ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Reduced fitness in progeny from old parents in a natural population.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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
59 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 160 citations in OpenAlex.
- Parental Age Effects on Offspring Telomere Length Across Vertebrates: A Meta-Analysis.Molecular ecology · 2026Pooled it
- The Effect of Age and Sex on the Rate of Germline Mutations in Barn Owls.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Persistent maternal age effects on male offspring fitness traits in a wild mammal population.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Aging dynamics in captive sea turtles reflect conserved life-history patterns across the testudine phylogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Effects of in ovo stimulation with potential epigenetic modulators on immune system phenotype across three generations in a chicken model.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Heritability and age-dependent changes in genetic variation of telomere length in a wild house sparrow population.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Not so social in old age: demography as one driver of decreasing sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- 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
- The value of long-term ecological research for evolutionary insights.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Review
- Maternal aging increases offspring adult body size via transmission of donut-shaped mitochondria.Cell research · 2023Article
- Stochasticity Explains Nongenetic Inheritance of Lifespan and Apparent Trade-Offs between Reproduction and Aging.Aging biology · 2023Article
- Ranking parameters driving siring success during sperm competition in the North African houbara bustard.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Sex-dependent effects of parental age on offspring fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird.Evolution letters · 2022Article
- Evidence of maternal and paternal age effects on speed in thoroughbred racehorses.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Female reproductive aging in seven primate species: Patterns and consequences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A genome-wide test for paternal indirect genetic effects on lifespan inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The role of maternal age, growth, and environment in shaping offspring performance in an aerial conifer seed bank.American journal of botany · 2022Article
- Parental age at conception on mouse lemur's offspring longevity: Sex-specific maternal effects.PloS one · 2022Article
- Evidence of Paternal Effects on Telomere Length Increases in Early Life.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A nongenetic, transgenerational effect of parental age on offspring fitness has been described in many taxa in the laboratory. Such a transgenerational fitness effect will have important influences on population dynamics, population age structure, and the evolution of aging and lifespan. However, effects of parental age on offspring lifetime fitness have never been demonstrated in a natural population. We show that parental age has sex-specific negative effects on lifetime fitness, using data from a pedigreed insular population of wild house sparrows. Birds whose parents were older produced fewer recruits annually than birds with younger parents, and the reduced number of recruits translated into a lifetime fitness difference. Using a long-term cross-fostering experiment, we demonstrate that this parental age effect is unlikely to be the result of changes in the environment but that it potentially is epigenetically inherited. Our study reveals the hidden consequences of late-life reproduction that persist into the next generation.
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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.