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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Thomas Kirkwood
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© 2021 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.Each animal in the Darwinian theater is exposed to a number of abiotic and biotic risk factors causing mortality. Several of these risk factors are intimately associated with the act of energy acquisition as such and with the amount of reserve the organism has available from this acquisition for overcoming temporary distress. Because a considerable fraction of an individual's lifetime energy acquisition is spent on somatic maintenance, there is a close link between energy expenditure on somatic maintenance and mortality risk. Here, we show, by simple life-history theory reasoning backed up by empirical cohort survivorship data, how reduction of mortality risk might be achieved by restraining allocation to somatic maintenance, which enhances lifetime fitness but results in aging. Our results predict the ubiquitous presence of senescent individuals in a highly diverse group of natural animal populations, which may display constant, increasing, or decreasing mortality with age. This suggests that allocation to somatic maintenance is primarily tuned to expected life span by stabilizing selection and is not necessarily traded against reproductive effort or other traits. Due to this ubiquitous strategy of modulating the somatic maintenance budget so as to increase fitness under natural conditions, it follows that individuals kept in protected environments with very low environmental mortality risk will have their expected life span primarily defined by somatic damage accumulation mechanisms laid down by natural selection in the wild.
Author(s): Omholt SW, Kirkwood TBL
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Year: 2021
Volume: 118
Issue: 22
Online publication date: 24/05/2021
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
ISSN (print): 0027-8424
ISSN (electronic): 1091-6490
Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
URL: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102088118
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2102088118
PubMed id: 34031251
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