Abstract
Early life for animals is often a time of rapid growth and development. In a resource-limited environment, life history theory predicts that there must be trade-offs between resource sinks in ways that optimize future survival and reproductive success. Telomeres have emerged as putative indicators of these early life trade-offs, but there are conflicting accounts as to how developmental traits and conditions impact telomere length and dynamics. For 2 years, we studied the nestlings of a breeding population of barn swallows from day 6 to day 12 of life, measuring various ontogenetic factors to understand to what extent they explain variation in telomere length and dynamics. We unexpectedly found that telomeres lengthened between the two sampling points. Nestlings in large broods had shorter telomeres, but surprisingly, individuals that grew faster from day 6 to day 12 had longer telomeres and more telomere lengthening. Nestlings with higher mass relative to their nestmates on d6 had shorter telomeres, suggesting that the relatively fast growth barn swallows experience early in development is more costly than the relatively slower growth later in development. These effects were only found in the first year of study. Telomere lengthening may be due to the initiation of new hematopoietic cell lines during development or the expression of telomerase early in life. Favorable early life conditions and high parental investment could allow for more growth with little to no cost to telomere length or dynamics.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Code availability
Analyses were done in R, and code is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Ilana Richter and Mattheus Santos for their assistance in the field and the property owners for allowing us access to their birds, particularly Patricia and Alan Wolf and Vicki and Joe Needham. Mark Haussmann provided helpful feedback on early drafts of the manuscript.
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This work was funded by Kenyon College and NSF IOS-1856254 awarded to I. Levin.
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IL, TT, and CV conceived and designed the study. IL, TT, YL, and CV collected the samples. CV, IL, YL, and KA conducted the associated lab work, and CV analyzed the data. CV and IL wrote the manuscript with input from other authors.
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Communicated by Andreas Nord.
This undergraduate-led study is a comprehensive, 2-year investigation of relative telomere length and dynamics in nestling barn swallows. The strengths of this work include the large number of nestlings sampled almost entirely from one breeding population, which allows us to fully leverage a substantial number of predictor variables using a linear mixed modeling approach. The most novel finding is the identification of substantial telomere lengthening during this period of nestling development, and we suggest a potential explanation of new hematopoietic cell line initiation during development that, to our knowledge, has not been previously explored in this context.
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Voirin, C.J., Tsunekage, T., Liu, Y. et al. Brood size is associated with apparent telomere lengthening in nestling barn swallows. Oecologia 202, 29–40 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05375-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05375-0