Abstract
The questions about why and how senescence occurs in the wild are among the most pertinent ones in evolutionary ecology. Telomere length is a commonly used marker for aging, while other biomarkers of aging have received considerably less attention. Here we studied how another potent indicator of aging—skin pentosidine concentration—relates to age and blood telomere length in a long-lived seabird with well-documented reproductive senescence. We found no associations between telomere length, skin pentosidine and chronological age in male common gulls (Larus canus), aging from 2 to 30 years. However, the variance in telomere length was 4.6 times higher among the birds older than 13 years, which hints at relaxed selection on telomere length among the birds that have passed their prime age of reproduction. These results suggest that physiological and chronological ages may be largely uncoupled in our study system. Furthermore, our findings do not support a hypothesis about the presence of a common physiological factor (e.g., such as oxidative stress) that would cause covariation between two independent markers of aging.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Elizabeth Falkenstein for her technical help with measurement of skin pentosidine, and Ulvi Karu, Richard Meitern and Marju Männiste for their help in the field. The study was financed by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (Target-financing Project # 0180004s09, Institutional Research Grant # 2015), the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence Frontiers in Biodiversity Research), Institutional Research Funding (Grants IUT21-1 and IUT34-8) by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, the West Virginia Agricultural and Forestry Experimental Station (H608), the Swedish Research Council (to DH), and partly by CAnMove (a Linneaus research excellence center at Lund University funded by the Swedish Research Council and Lund University). The study was conducted under license from the Committee of Animal Experiments at Estonian Ministry of Agriculture (decision # 5, issued on 20 April 2013).
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Rattiste, K., Klandorf, H., Urvik, J. et al. Skin pentosidine and telomere length do not covary with age in a long-lived seabird. Biogerontology 16, 435–441 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10522-015-9564-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10522-015-9564-1