Speaker
Description
Birds, in comparison to mammals, are relatively long lived for their size and were once thought to largely escape senescence. As longitudinal studies have accumulated, it has, however, become clear that many avian traits show signs of late-life deterioration. In addition, there is increasing evidence for transgenerational effects of parental age. Using individual-based data from a large colony of a long-lived seabird, the common tern Sterna hirundo, it was found that recruited daughters from older mothers suffer from reduced annual reproductive success. Additionally, recruited sons from older fathers suffer from reduced life span and both effects translate to reductions in offspring lifetime reproductive success. In this talk, I will describe these sex-specific parental age effects, and introduce current work on telomere length, de novo mutation and DNA methylation to study the potential mechanisms underlying them.
