ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Effects of early-life competition and maternal nutrition on telomere lengths in wild meerkats.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- The ecology of gestational growth in a wild cooperative mammal.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Telomere Dynamics in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Critical Synthesis.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- A novel carnivorous diet reduces brain telomere length.Biology letters · 2025Article
- A female-biased gene expression signature of dominance in cooperatively breeding meerkats.Molecular ecology · 2024Article
- A future food boom rescues the negative effects of early-life adversity on adult lifespan in a small mammal.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Androgen-mediated maternal effects and trade-offs: postnatal hormone development, growth, and survivorship in wild meerkats.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2024Article
- Early-life telomere length predicts life-history strategy and reproductive senescence in a threatened wild songbird.Molecular ecology · 2023Article
- Fitness consequences of outgroup conflict.eLife · 2022Review
- Early-life conditions impact juvenile telomere length, but do not predict later life-history strategies or fitness in a wild vertebrate.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Hot and dry conditions predict shorter nestling telomeres in an endangered songbird: Implications for population persistence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Agonism and grooming behaviour explain social status effects on physiology and gene regulation in rhesus macaques.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The tarnished silver spoon? Trade-off between prenatal growth and telomere length in wild boar.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2022Article
- Longitudinal evidence that older parents produce offspring with longer telomeres in a wild social bird.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Early maternal separation is not associated with changes in telomere length in domestic kittens (PeerJ · 2021Article
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- Distinct telomere differences within a reproductively bimodal common lizard population.Functional ecology · 2019Article
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- Telomere elongation during early development is independent of environmental temperatures in Atlantic salmon.The Journal of experimental biology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Early-life adversity can affect health, survival and fitness later in life, and recent evidence suggests that telomere attrition may link early conditions with their delayed consequences. Here, we investigate the link between early-life competition and telomere length in wild meerkats. Our results show that, when multiple females breed concurrently, increases in the number of pups in the group are associated with shorter telomeres in pups. Given that pups from different litters compete for access to milk, we tested whether this effect is due to nutritional constraints on maternal milk production, by experimentally supplementing females' diets during gestation and lactation. While control pups facing high competition had shorter telomeres, the negative effects of pup number on telomere lengths were absent when maternal nutrition was experimentally improved. Shortened pup telomeres were associated with reduced survival to adulthood, suggesting that early-life competition for nutrition has detrimental fitness consequences that are reflected in telomere lengths. Dominant females commonly kill pups born to subordinates, thereby reducing competition and increasing growth rates of their own pups. Our work suggests that an additional benefit of infanticide may be that it also reduces telomere shortening caused by competition for resources, with associated benefits for offspring ageing profiles and longevity.
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