Pay up or die: Tradeoffs between costly telomere maintenance, somatic growth, and body condition in embryonic and adult sand lizards

Current knowledge about telomere biology relies to a very high degree on results from research on endotherms. This would not be problematic if organisms shared the same mechanisms regulating telomere length (TL) but this is not necessarily the case; e.g., most endotherms lack, or have very low levels, of telomerase (the main telomere repair enzyme) in adult somatic tissues, whereas they appear ubiquitous in ectotherms. To what extent this will bias our understanding of TL dynamics is largely unknown, since longitudinal studies of ectotherms in the wild have been exceedingly rare. Here, we analyze TL dynamics using qPCR-based analysis on a wild population of sand lizards (Lacerta agilis), with somatic telomerase, during a field and laboratory study over a decade. We show that slower-developing embryos hatch with longer TL, embryos from mothers surviving predator attacks more recently have shorter TL, and embryos that die in incubation have shorter TL than those that hatch out successfull..., , # Data from: Pay up or die: Tradeoffs between costly telomere maintenance, somatic growth, and body condition in embryonic and adult sand lizards

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.wdbrv1626](10.5061/dryad.wdbrv1626)

NOTE: Empty boxes in the available Excel sheets represent missing values for that specific trait and individual. In SAS, which has been used for the analyses, missing values are replaced by full stops (missing values should be replaced by program-specific identifiers, depending on which software you use).

## Description of the data and file structure

Description of data files for MS ‘Pay up or die: tradeoffs between costly telomere maintenance, somatic growth and body condition in embryonic and adult sand lizards’

**File: EmbryonicGrowthData.xls**

Variables:

mom = maternal ID number

bdate = birth date

jsex = offspring sex

ontsurv = ontogenetic survivorship (0=died, 1=survived to hatching)

surv = first year survivorship (0=died, 1=survived)

byear = year of birth

fsvl =...,