Check out our paper: Parental Age Effects on Offspring Telomere Length Across Vertebrates: A Meta-Analysis

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Check out our paper for details! Huge thanks to my supervisors, group members of DRG, Lundy company and its staff, Lundy Field Society, @lundybirds.bsky.social , and to @gensocuk.bsky.social @rug.nl , the European Union and the UK Natural Environment Research Council for funding.

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However, this pattern was not observed in males. Instead, male reproduction was affected by the environment in which they were reared: if males were reared in a noisy environment, they showed accelerated reproductive schedules, consistent with the internal PAR hypothesis.

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What’s more, female reproductive success was reduced if females were incubated and hatched in an environment impacted by anthropogenic noise, which was a Silver Spoon effect resulting from the prenatal environment.

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We found that the more fledglings a bird had in their rearing nest, the faster their survival increased in early life and decreased in late life.

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We used a 23-year dataset from a wild house sparrow population on Lundy Island and used cross-fostering to investigate how long-term survival and reproduction are affected by prenatal and rearing environments.

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The Silver Spoon hypothesis posits that a poor developmental environment will lead to a reduction in survival and reproduction in adulthood, while the internal PAR (Predictive Adaptive Response) hypothesis proposes accelerated reproductive schedules in response to the reduced expected lifespan

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Environmental conditions under which an organism develops can have lifetime effects on their survival and reproduction, but does a bad environment only constrain the development of optimal life history traits, or can individuals respond adaptively?

The environment an animal grows up in can affect it for life, but it may affect females and males differently – check out the first results of my PhD research: academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...
w/ @terryburke.bsky.social @hannahdugdale.bsky.social and @jj255.bsky.social !

(© Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar)

Great to have the opportunity to share our group's work at #ESEB2025 @yuhengsun.bsky.social @euantheyoung.bsky.social with @erikpostma.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social @yagmurerten.bsky.social

Parental age effects on offspring telomere length across vertebrates: a meta-analysis Telomeres shorten with advancing age in numerous species, and shorter telomeres are linked to increased mortality risk. While parental age at conception can influence offspring telomere length, the ma...

Pre-print by MSc student Mariia Vlasova with @yuhengsun.bsky.social and Janet Chik: Parental age effects on offspring telomere length across vertebrates: a meta-analysis. doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🎉

1st PhD paper from @yuhengsun.bsky.social 🎉 Long-term fitness effects of the early-life environment in a wild bird population @jj255.bsky.social @terryburke.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/behe...

This short observation was a great gateway to asking bigger questions (like @yuhengsun.bsky.social's paper on information in shearwater calls).
It also again highlights how little we understand the nocturnal behaviour of otherwise well-studied birds. 6/6 🪶
(sadly I couldn't embed the .gif) #seabirds

The awesome @yuhengsun.bsky.social showed that manx shearwater calls are individual - meaning they could use them as names! Absolutely fantastic publication from a masters thesis! @jamiedunning.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We've had a paper published today in @avianbiology.bsky.social.

We demonstrated that some elements of Manx shearwater calls can be used to identify individuals. Something long-suspected, but not tested.

In future, this could be used to measure site fidelity or breeding group size. #ornithology