CONSENT · Causes and consequences of senescence in wild insects
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2020-08-31
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Causes and consequences of senescence in wild insects
Senescence (age related decline in biological performance and increased mortality risk) is ubiquitous in natural populations including humans and short-lived invertebrates, but ageing mechanisms remain poorly understood in nature. The main reason for this is because candidate mechanisms are predominately studied in laboratory systems that do not reflect natural populations. This project aims to address three major issues that currently limit progress in ageing research: 1. Laboratory model systems are studied in conditions that involve abundant food, no predators and no disease. Consequently, the natural environmental conditions that shaped the evolution of life-history traits are lacking, which dramatically affects the phenotypic expression of ageing and its fitness consequences. There is a pressing need for model systems that can be studied in both lab and field. 2. It is unclear to what extent life-history trade-offs reflect genetic correlations, despite the fact that the heritability of such trade-offs is a prerequisite for natural selection to act directly on them. Existing studies on this subject are ambiguous and do not include insects, the most important group for studying ageing in the lab. 3. Telomere shortening is a promising candidate biomarker of ageing in vertebrates including humans. However, the causes of in vivo telomere shortening remain elusive, which is in part due to telomere attrition being a slow proccess taking decades in humans. I will study ageing and its underlying mechanism in field crickets both in the lab and in the wild. The project takes advantage of the fact that insects have very short lifespans making it possible to study ageing and the candidate underpinning mechanisms within a relavite short timespan of weeks. The main research objectives are to investigate whether ageing is the result from life-history trade-offs and the extent to which such trade-offs reflect genetic constraints, or environmental effects. I will in detail investigate whether telomere attrition underpins the ageing phenotype of field crickets.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project will study the evolutionary ecology of senescence – how and why biological performance declines with age. Understanding senescence in nature requires us to study interactions between the environment and natural and sexual selection and how they shape patterns of ageing. I will study life-history trade-offs in both lab and natural environments exploiting an existing project on a wild cricket population that has amassed 12 years of data. My study system consists of annual generations of a few hundred individually tagged, video-monitored and genotyped individuals. This system will allow me to address evolutionary questions about senescence that are very hard to study in much longer lived vertebrates. My approach of studying senescence in both lab and field environments is timely in the face of the current state of the art showing that the fitness outcomes of genetically controlled pathways with pleiotropic early and late-life effects depend on the environment in which they are studied. I will use techniques in eco-physiology (telomere measurements), animal breeding (quantitative genetics), and evolutionary ecology (life-history trade-offs and animal behaviour) to study the extent to which (i) telomeres can be used as biomarker of ageing in insects, (ii) life-history trade-offs including behaviour underpinning senescence, and (iii) the extent to which these phenotypic correlations are also expressed as genetic correlations i.e. are they heritable? These questions are key to solving the enigma of ageing, and their answers will be important for research aimed at understanding processes that drive the demographic ageing of Europe’s society. In my past research I led an eight-year experiment testing the trade-off between reproduction and ageing and telomere shortening in a large wild bird population (papers in Ecol. Lett. 2014 & 2015 & Proc.Soc.B 2014). I am excited to switch to insects to address questions that have never been tackled in their natural context.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER · ExeterCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union