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H2020Individual fellowship2017–2019

WHYAGE · COULD SENESCENCE BE ADAPTIVE? CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF AGING ACROSS THE TREE OF LIFE

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2017-05-01 → 2019-08-28
EU contribution
€200,195
Participants
1
Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

COULD SENESCENCE BE ADAPTIVE? CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF AGING ACROSS THE TREE OF LIFE

With increasing age, we are more likely to die, and less likely to reproduce. This is ‘senescence’. Unlike humans, not everything senesces: we now know that some organisms have unchanging or even increasing survival and reproduction with age ('negligible' or 'negative' senescence respectively). Survival and reproduction control whether populations increase or decline, so understanding aging is important for conserving threatened, declining species. Yet, we don't even know how such diverse aging has evolved. The WHYAGE project links diverse aging patterns to population dynamics of plants and animals across the whole tree of life, to understand the consequences of aging for populations, and gain insight into how diverse aging patterns potentially evolved.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Why do organisms age? This is surely one of the most compelling questions in biology. With advancing age, organisms can see physiological decline leading to higher mortality and lower fertility, a process known as ‘senescence’. The foundations of aging research state senescence should be inevitable in any organism, and is likely a by-product of attenuation in force of selection with age. But is senescence inevitable? Could senescence be adaptive?Senescence is not inevitable, according to recent research from the Max Planck Odense Center, University of Southern Denmark. Species’ aging trajectories are diverse; mortality and fertility may increase, decrease or stay constant with age. We need a new way to understand aging, which recognises this diversity and seeks to understand pattern and process in the evolution of aging across the tree of life. The WHYAGE project explores ecological consequences and evolutionary causes of diversity in aging from this ‘macro’ perspective.Senescence could be adaptive. This proposal presents a theoretical framework under which certain environmental disturbances affecting population age structures could, through population-level processes, favour senescent individuals. More generally, diverse environmental disturbance regimes could help explain diversity of aging across the tree of life.Three objectives facilitate the project. First, demographic method development will allow better understanding of aging trajectories in mortality and fecundity, and population dynamics influenced by these. Second, comparative phylogenetic analyses of global demographic databases of plants and animals will uncover the consequences of aging for population dynamics across the tree of life. This knowledge will inform the third objective; development of theoretical population models exploring how environmental disturbances and population dynamics feed into evolutionary processes, and using these to find conditions under which senescence may be adaptive.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • SYDDANSK UNIVERSITET · Odense MCoordinatorDenmark

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union