Flourishing recent comparative studies on senescence have revealed an uncovered diversity across the tree of life of the shapes of the age trajectories of mortality (actuarial senescence) and to a lesser extent of reproduction (reproductive senescence). Evolutionary theories have been called up to explain why some species suffer from positive senescence while others benefit from […]
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Reproductive and worker castes of termites differ greatly in their morphology and behavior but also in their fertility and longevity. Kings and queens of the highly social termite, Macrotermes natalensis, live for decades, with the queen laying thousands of eggs per day. Workers are sterile and only live a few weeks. In our HFSP project, we investigated the regulatory mechanisms involved in generating such diverse phenotypes. Our previous results indicate that well-regulated transcription allows reproductive castes to overcome simultaneously several well-known hallmarks of aging.
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This study unraveled the impacts of accelerated aging pace as a corollary of climate-driven population decline. We found transgenerational accumulation of telomere shortening implying that offspring were already born “old”. We suggest that this process may exacerbate across generations, leading to an aging loop in the population. This model posits that telomere dynamics should represent a molecular biomarker of extirpation, and likely a central cause and promising solution for future biodiversity managing actions.
Kings and queens of social termites can live for decades, while queens sustain a nearly maximal fertility. We found that they defy aging by multiple gene expression and metabolic changes, while permitting extreme fertility in queens.
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“Here, we used 37 years of mark-recapture data in two nearby habitats inside a meadow viper Vipera ursinii population to quantify life expectancies, generation times and the shape of actuarial and reproductive senescence.”