PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Foteini Spagopoulou
AU  - Celine Teplitsky
AU  - Martin I. Lind
AU  - Lars Gustafsson
AU  - Alexei A. Maklakov
TI  - Silver-spoon upbringing improves early-life fitness but promotes reproductive ageing in a wild bird
AID  - 10.1101/535625
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 535625
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/31/535625.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/31/535625.full
AB  - Early-life conditions can have long-lasting effects and organisms that experience a poor start in life are often expected to age at a faster rate. Alternatively, individuals raised in high-quality environments can overinvest in early-reproduction resulting in rapid ageing. Here we use a long-term experimental manipulation of early-life conditions in a natural population of collared flycatchers (Ficedula albicollis), to show that females raised in a low-competition environment (artificially reduced broods) have higher early-life reproduction but lower late-life reproduction than females raised in high-competition environment (artificially increased broods). Reproductive success of high-competition females peaked in late-life, when low-competition females were already in steep reproductive decline and suffered from a higher mortality rate. Our results demonstrate that “silver-spoon” natal conditions increase female early-life performance at the cost of faster reproductive ageing and increased late-life mortality. These findings demonstrate experimentally that natal environment shapes individual variation in reproductive and demographic ageing in nature.