Age at first reproduction and senescence in a short‐lived wild mammal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Senescence is the degradation of biological functions with increasing age. Its existence and relationship with life‐history strategies remains poorly studied in short‐lived wild vertebrate species. We investigated the relationships between age at first reproduction (AFR), reproductive senescence and longevity in an eastern chipmunk Tamias striatus population, where the first opportunity to breed is conditioned by pulses of seed production by trees (i.e. masts). We used 11 years of data from a longitudinal study, in which females breed for the first time at seven, 15 or 22 months of age and males at seven or 15 months of age. We first assessed the effect of age on three traits associated with breeding performance, namely the number of offspring produced, and the probability of producing an offspring. We then tested whether an earlier AFR accelerated reproductive senescence and reduced survival of both males and females. We found sex‐specific relationships between AFR and senescence. Females reproducing at 15 or 22 months of age showed reproductive senescence, but early‐breeding females did not show any decline in reproductive performance at an older age. Also, although we observed reproductive senescence in males, it was not affected by AFR. Our results are consistent with studies highlighting the existence of reproductive senescence in small, wild mammals. Importantly, we provide the first evidence that AFR can strongly influence the patterns of senescence in small short‐lived species, and does it in a sex‐specific way. Our results highlight the importance of studying life‐history strategies in both males and females when studying senescence in the wild.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".