Young parents produce offspring with short telomeres: A study in a long-lived bird, the Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophrys).

ABSTRACT: In wild vertebrates, young parents are less likely to successfully rear offspring relative to older ones because of lower parental skills ('the constraint hypothesis'), lower parental investment ('the restraint hypothesis') or because of a progressive disappearance of lower-quality individuals at young ages ('the selection hypothesis'). Because it is practically difficult to follow an offspring during its entire life, most studies have only focused on the ability of individuals to breed or produce young, while neglecting the ability of such young to subsequently survive and reproduce. Several proxies of individual quality can be useful to assess the ability of young to survive and recruit into the population. Among them, telomere length measurement appears especially promising because telo

SUBMITTER: Dupont SM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5862442 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature