Parental age effects on offspring fitness in a wild population of a short-lived reptile

As organisms age, the fitness of the offspring they produce can decline, which is often attributed to parental senescence. However, few studies have tested for effects of parental age on offspring fitness in wild populations or in short-lived vertebrates, and only recently have studies begun to examine such effects in male and female offspring independently. Here, we use five generations of mark-recapture and genetic parentage data from an island population of a short-lived lizard, the brown anole (Anolis sagrei), to test for effects of maternal and paternal age on the survival to adulthood, first-year reproductive success, longevity, and lifetime fitness of their offspring. We tested for effects of maternal and paternal age on components of offspring fitness using two methods: 1) “within-year” analyses of parents of different ages within the same annual reproductive season, and 2) “within-parent” repeated-measures analyses of the same parents at different ages across successive reprodu..., , # Parental age effects on offspring fitness in a wild population of a short-lived reptile

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.jm63xsjpz](10.5061/dryad.jm63xsjpz)

## Description of the data and file structure

The findings of this paper are drawn from a mark-recapture and genotyping study carried out on a focal island population of brown anole lizards (*Anolis sagrei*) within the Guana Tolomato Matanzas Natural Estuarine Research Reserve in Florida. Although animals in this population have been tracked between 2011 and 2025 from a long-term ongoing study, this dataset primarily focuses on the individuals in the 2015-2018 cohorts, their survival, reproductive fitness, and parent ages. In this study, we evaluated the effects of parental age on offspring fitness. We tested for both maternal and paternal age effects on the fitness of sons and daughters.

Based on the methods, the dataset provided illustrates individual identity of animals (e.g., ID, Sex, Cohort) and information on parents, as dete...,