"The effect of germline senescence on life history evolution"Erten, E. YagmurReproductive success shows age-associated patterns across the tree of life. An individual’s reproductive success can increase with age, due to e.g. gaining experience or attaining a larger body size. However, increasing age can also associate with a decline in reproductive success; having old parents leads to reduced offspring quality in various species. The latter can arise due to the deterioration of parents’ body condition with age and the resulting decrease in parental investment. Alternatively, or additionally, reduced offspring quality can result from deterioration of parents’ germline with age, i.e. germline senescence. Various mechanisms can underlie germline senescence, including the accumulation of deleterious mutations, telomere shortening, or mitochondrial deterioration. Importantly, while both somatic and germline deterioration in parents can affect offspring quality, alterations in germline can potentially be inherited and create a cumulative effect across generations. Therefore, disentangling the effect of parental somatic deterioration from that of germline senescence can increase our understanding of parental age effects and their role in life history evolution. Here, I will discuss how intergenerational effects can present across the tree of life and introduce a study where we explicitly model the two aspects of parental deterioration (somatic and germline) and investigate how reproductive strategies and allocation to germline maintenance evolve under different scenarios. |
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