Data from: Aging parasites produce offspring with poor fitness prospects

Senescing individuals have poor survival prospects and low fecundity. They can also produce offspring with reduced survival and reproductive success. We tested the effect of parental age on the performance of descendants in the nematode Heligmosomoides polygyrus, an intestinal parasite of rodents. We found that offspring of senescing worms had reduced within-host survival and reduced egg shedding over the first month post-infection compared with offspring produced by young parents. These results suggest that declining offspring quality is a component of senescence in parasitic nematodes and might have evolutionary consequences for the optimal schedule of age-dependent investment into reproductive effort.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2k11f
PID https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:nl:ui:13-jr-xqao
Metadata Access https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:easy.dans.knaw.nl:easy-dataset:110463
Provenance
Creator Lippens, Cédric; Faivre, Bruno; Lechenault, Clothilde; Sorci, Gabriele
Publisher Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)
Publication Year 2017
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; License: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Life Sciences; Medicine