Collaborative Research: Evolution and Ecology of Aging in Natural Populations of Long-Lived Vertebrates

衰老是指死亡概率随着年龄的增长而增加。通常被称为“老龄化”，这种随着年龄增长的死亡率上升是由于潜在的生理和生化过程的恶化。不同种类的动物在寿命和老龄化速度上存在巨大差异。迄今为止，人们对这种变异的进化和生态原因知之甚少。通过将实地研究、实验室分析和数学模型应用于衰老速度不同的蛇种群自然系统，将了解衰老变化的原因以及对寿命和健康寿命的影响。如何在自然种群中保持衰老速率的差异这一问题的答案将有助于理解人类和其他生物的衰老进化史，需要进行研究，以发展适用于所有多细胞生命的衰老进化和持久性的一般理论。通过专门针对高中生和传统上在环境生物学中代表性较低的群体的本科生，这项研究将直接支持环境生物学和田间生态学的多样性，以及传统的实验室实验。这些关于自然界衰老机制和普遍性的研究，在一个丰富和长期研究的系统上，将有助于深入了解老龄化在种群生物学中的相对重要性，老龄化和年龄结构对濒危物种种群动态的影响，以及人类物种的老龄化过程和年龄结构的变化。

Senescence is the increase in probability of death with advancing age. Commonly referred to as "aging", this increasing mortality with age is due to the deterioration of underlying physiological and biochemical processes. Different species of animals are wildly divergent in their lifespans and aging rates. To date, little is known of the evolutionary and ecological causes of such variation. By applying field studies, laboratory assays, and mathematical models to a well-documented natural system of snake populations that vary in aging rate, the causes of variation in aging and consequences for lifespan and health span will be learned. The answer to the question of how variation in aging rates is maintained in natural populations will aid in an understanding of the evolutionary history of aging in humans and other organisms and needs to be studied to develop a general theory of the evolution and persistence of aging that applies to all multicellular life. Through specifically targeting high school students and undergraduates of groups traditionally underrepresented in environmental biology, this research will directly support diversity in environmental biology and field ecology, as well as traditional laboratory experimentation. These studies on the mechanisms and prevalence of aging in nature, on an abundant and long-studied system, will yield insights into the relative importance of aging in population biology, the impacts of aging and age-structure on the population dynamics of imperiled species, and the aging process and changing age-structure of the human species.