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Consequences Of Recruitmentdecisions And Heterogeneity On Age-Specific Breeding Success In A Long-Lived Seabird, Lise M. Aubry, David N. Koons, Jean Yves Monnat, Emmanuelle Cam

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

An individual’s age at first reproduction and investment in successive reproductive attempts are involved in mechanisms that can impede somatic repair, resulting in a decline in reproductive abilities with age (reproductive senescence). We used long-term data from the Black-legged Kittiwake, a long-lived seabird, to address the relationship between recruitment age, age-specific breeding success (BS), and reproductive senescence, while accounting for breeding experience and temporal variation in BS. We first detected late-life improvement in BS across all recruitment groups, which we recognized as ‘‘within-generation selection’’ or the selective disappearance of ‘‘frail’’ phenotypes. When such heterogeneity was accurately accounted for, we showed …