van de Crommenacker, J., Hammers, M., Dugdale, H.L. et al. (3 more authors) (2022) Early‐life conditions impact juvenile telomere length, but do not predict later life‐history strategies or fitness in a wild vertebrate. Ecology and Evolution, 12 (6). e8971. ISSN 2045-7758
Abstract
Environmental conditions experienced during early life may have long-lasting effects on later-life phenotypes and fitness. Individuals experiencing poor early-life conditions may suffer subsequent fitness constraints. Alternatively, individuals may use a strategic “Predictive Adaptive Response” (PAR), whereby they respond—in terms of physiology or life-history strategy—to the conditions experienced in early life to maximize later-life fitness. Particularly, the Future Lifespan Expectation (FLE) PAR hypothesis predicts that when poor early-life conditions negatively impact an individual's physiological state, it will accelerate its reproductive schedule to maximize fitness during its shorter predicted life span. We aimed to measure the impact of early-life conditions and resulting fitness across individual lifetimes to test predictions of the FLE hypothesis in a wild, long-lived model species. Using a long-term individual-based dataset, we investigated how early-life conditions are linked with subsequent fitness in an isolated population of the Seychelles warbler Acrocephalus sechellensis. How individuals experience early-life environmental conditions may vary greatly, so we also tested whether telomere length—shorter telomers are a biomarker of an individual's exposure to stress—can provide an effective measure of the individual-specific impact of early-life conditions. Specifically, under the FLE hypothesis, we would expect shorter telomeres to be associated with accelerated reproduction. Contrary to expectations, shorter juvenile telomere length was not associated with poor early-life conditions, but instead with better conditions, probably as a result of faster juvenile growth. Furthermore, neither juvenile telomere length, nor other measures of early-life conditions, were associated with age of first reproduction or the number of offspring produced during early life in either sex. We found no support for the FLE hypothesis. However, for males, poor early-life body condition was associated with lower first-year survival and reduced longevity, indicating that poor early-life conditions pose subsequent fitness constraints. Our results also showed that using juvenile telomere length as a measure of early-life conditions requires caution, as it is likely to not only reflect environmental stress but also other processes such as growth.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | constraints; early-life environmental conditions; future life span expectation hypothesis; juvenile telomere length; natural wild population; predictive adaptive responses; Seychelles warbler |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 04 Jul 2022 13:56 |
Last Modified: | 10 Feb 2023 14:13 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/ece3.8971 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:188663 |