Mechanisms of age-related change in performance in a wild social bird: parental age effects, cellular senescence, and dominance acquisition

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Humans and wild animals typically show late-life declines in fitness and health, a phenomenon knownas senescence. The causes of these age-related declines are now a key focus of research inevolutionary biology and biomedicine. While most work to date has focussed on the plight ofindividuals as they age, it is fast becoming clear that a major component of senescence arises fromtrans-generational effects of the age of parents on the fitness of their offspring. However, the relativeimportance of maternal and paternal age effects and the mechanisms that generate them remainpoorly understood. This is significant, given the key role that parental age effects may play ingenerating individual variation in health and ageing trajectories in both human and wild animalpopulations.This project will provide the first test of the role that telomeres (nucleoprotein complexes thatpreserve chromosomal integrity) play in generating parental age effects in a wild vertebrate. Whileresearch on humans and wild vertebrates has highlighted the potential for parental age effects onoffspring telomere lengths, comprehensive field studies of these effects have yet to be conducted.This project will combine longitudinal field research on an established study population of wild birdsin the Kalahari desert (the white-browed sparrow weaver; Plocepasser mahali) with cutting edgelaboratory analyses of telomere length and statistical modelling of existing life-history, behaviouraland genetic data sets to investigate: (i) maternal and paternal age effects on offspring telomeres, (ii)the extent to which these can be attributed to age effects on parental investment or gamete telomerelengths, and (iii) the extent to which parental age effects on offspring telomeres can account forparental age effects on offspring fitness.