Environmental, not individual, factors drive markers of biological aging in black bears
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Title
Environmental, not individual, factors drive markers of biological aging in black bears
Description
Aging negatively affects individual survival and reproduction; consequently, characterizing the factors behind aging can enhance our understanding of fitness in wild populations. The drivers of biological age are diverse, but often related to factors like chronological age or sex of the individual. Recently, however, environmental factors have been shown to strongly influence biological age. To explore the relative importance of these influences on biological aging in a free-ranging and long-lived vertebrate, we quantified the length of telomeres—highly conserved DNA sequences that cap the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes and a useful molecular marker of biological age—for black bears sampled throughout Colorado, and measured a variety of environmental variables (habitat productivity, human development, latitude, elevation) and individual characteristics (age, sex, body size, genetic relatedness). Our extensive sampling of bears (n = 245) revealed no relationships between telomere length and any individual characteristics. Instead, we found a broad-scale latitudinal pattern in telomere length, with bears in northern Colorado possessing shorter telomeres. Our results suggest that environmental characteristics overwhelm individual ones in determining biological aging for this large carnivore.
Bibliographic Citation
Kirby, R., M. W. Alldredge, and J. N. Pauli. 2017. Environmental, not individual, factors drive markers of biological aging in black bears. Evolutionary Ecology 31:571–584. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-017-9885-4
Creator
Kirby, Rebecca
Alldredge, Mathew W.
Pauli, Jonathan N.
Subject
Biological aging
Landscape variation
Stress
Telomere
Ursus americanus
Extent
15 pages
Date Created
2017-01-17
Type
Article
Format
application/pdf
Language
English
Is Part Of
Evolutionary Ecology
Collection
Citation
Kirby, Rebecca, Alldredge, Mathew W., and Pauli, Jonathan N., “Environmental, not individual, factors drive markers of biological aging in black bears,” CPW Digital Collections, accessed April 24, 2024, https://cpw.cvlcollections.org/items/show/92.