ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2009
Great tits growing old: selective disappearance and the partitioning of senescence to stages within the breeding cycle.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 225 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Asynchrony of ageing among traits in a wild bird population.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- The role of viability selection in shaping short- and long-term consequences of early-life conditions: An experiment in the Alpine swift.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Age at First Reproduction Predicts Sex-Specific Parasite Infection Trajectories Through Adulthood.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Phenological plasticity enables thermal homeostasis in a wild bird population.Science advances · 2026Article
- Diagnosing confounded Bateman gradients.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- Aging dynamics in captive sea turtles reflect conserved life-history patterns across the testudine phylogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Exposing the role of individual heterogeneity in bighorn sheep population dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Reproductive output of old males is limited by seminal fluid, not sperm number.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Continent-Wide Drivers of Spatial Synchrony in Breeding Demographic Structure Across Wild Great Tit Populations.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- The ecology of ageing in wild societies: linking age structure and social behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- What does not kill you makes you stronger? Effects of paternal age at conception on fathers and sons.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2024Article
- Social network shrinking is explained by active and passive effects but not increasing selectivity with age in wild macaques.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Age- and trait-dependent breeding responses to environmental variation in a short-lived songbird.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Stochasticity Explains Nongenetic Inheritance of Lifespan and Apparent Trade-Offs between Reproduction and Aging.Aging biology · 2023Article
- Phenotypic plasticity increases exposure to extreme climatic events that reduce individual fitness.Global change biology · 2023Article
- Effects of developmental and adult environments on ageing.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Experimentally manipulated food availability affects offspring quality but not quantity in zebra finch meso-populations.Oecologia · 2022Article
- Individual variation explains ageing patterns in a cooperatively breeding bird, the long-tailed tit Aegithalos caudatus.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Deterioration of reproductive traits with age is observed in an increasing number of species. Although such deterioration is often attributed to reproductive senescence, a within-individual decline in reproductive success with age, few studies on wild animals have focused on direct fitness measures while accounting for selective disappearance and terminal effects, and to our knowledge none have determined how senescence effects arise from underlying reproductive traits. We show for female great tits that such an approach helps understanding of the onset, impact and architecture of senescence. Cross-sectional analysis of 49 years of breeding data shows annual recruit production to decline from 3.5 years of age, this decline affecting 9 per cent of females each year. Longitudinal analyses, however, show that selective disappearance of poor-quality breeders partly masks senescence, which in fact starts at 2.8 years and affects 21 per cent of females each year. There is no evidence for abrupt terminal effects. Analyses of underlying traits show no deterioration in clutch size, but significant declines in brood size and fledgling number. Furthermore, these traits contribute -9, 12 and 39 per cent to the senescent decline in recruit production, respectively. Besides providing detailed knowledge of the patterns and architecture of senescence in a natural population, these results illustrate the importance of modelling individual variation, and facilitate study of the underlying mechanisms of senescence.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.