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van de Crommenacker, Janske, Hammers, Martijn, Dugdale, Hannah L., Burke, Terry A., Komdeur, Jan and Richardson, David S. 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7226-9074
(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).
ISSN 2045-7758
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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.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | Author acknowledgements: We thank Nature Seychelles who allowed us to work on Cousin Island Nature Reserve and provided facilities during our visits. Permissions for fieldwork was given by the Department of Environment and the Seychelles Bureau of Standards. We thank everyone who helped in the field and the Cousin Island staff for welcoming us on the island. We thank Emma Barrett, Lewis Spurgin and Ellie Fairfield for telomere analyses, Marco van der Velde for DNA sexing, and Owen Howison for maintenance of the long‐term database. The long‐term dataset collection and telomere work has been funded by NERC grants to DSR (NE/F02083X/1, NE/K005502/1) and to TAB and DSR (NE/B504106/1). Further funding for the warbler project derived from a NERC grant (NE/P011284/1) to HLD and DSR, NWO Rubicon (825.09.013) and NERC (NE/I021748/1) fellowships to HLD, Lucie Burgers Foundation and KNAW Schure Beijerinck Popping grant (SBP2013/04) to HLD, and an NWO grant (854.11.003) to JK and DSR. JvdC was funded by an ALW grant from the Dutch Science Council (NWO) allocated to JK (823.01.014), and MH by a NWO VENI Fellowship (863.13.017). |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | constraints,early-life environmental conditions,future life span expectation hypothesis,juvenile telomere length,natural wild population,predictive adaptive responses,seychelles warbler,ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics,ecology,nature and landscape conservation ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105 |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 05 Apr 2024 14:34 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Nov 2024 14:30 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94845 |
| DOI: | 10.1002/ece3.8971 |
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