Data from: Differential aging of bite and jump performance in virgin and mated Teleogryllus commodus crickets

Evolutionary theories of aging state that the force of natural selection
declines with age, resulting in trait senescence. However, sexual
selection theory predicts that costly traits that signal mate value should
increase in expression as survival prospects decline. Mortality rates and
fertility tend to show strong signatures of senescence, whereas sexual
signalling traits increase with age, but how the expression of traits such
as whole-organism performance measures that are subject to both sexual and
non-sexual selection should change with age is unclear. We examined the
effects of both a key life-history event (mating) and diet quality (male
and female optimal diets) on aging in two whole-organism performance
traits (bite force and jump take-off velocity) in male and female
Teleogryllus commodus crickets. We found no evidence for diet effects on
any of the measured traits. Aging effects were more evident in females
than in males for both jumping and biting, and constitute a mix of
senescence and terminal investment patterns depending on sex/mating class.
Sex and mating therefore have important implications for resource
allocation to performance traits, and hence for aging of those traits, and
interactions between these two factors can result in complex changes in
trait expression over individual lifetimes.