No evidence for paternal age effects on sons or daughters, when accounting for paternal sperm storage

A father’s age at conception is predicted to affect not only his own fertility but also his offspring’s fitness. Offspring born to old fathers are assumed to be less fit than those of young fathers. However, under low mating rates, paternal age might be confounded with the duration for which mature sperm are stored in fathers prior to ejaculation. Studies that disentangle the confounding paternal effects of sperm storage duration from those of age, on offspring, are lacking. We use Drosophila melanogaster to test the separate and interactive effects of paternal age and sexual rest on offspring fitness. As expected, old fathers produce fewer offspring than young fathers, however, paternal age does not influence the survival or age-dependent reproductive success of sons or daughters. Instead, a long duration of paternal sexual rest negatively impacts the reproductive success of the conceived sons. Furthermore, daughters of low reproductive quality selectively disappear with age, but sons ..., Data was collected via experiments conducted in 2022 and 2023. Data were processed on R studio and MS excel., , # No evidence for paternal age effects on sons or daughters, when accounting for paternal sperm storage

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcgg](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcgg)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data analysis and data files

Software: R v4.3.1

Packages: pacman, tidyverse, dplyr, kableExtra, emmeans, bookdown, performance, remotes, patchwork, ggplot2, gamm4, MCMCglmm, knitr, rmarkdown, lme4, lmerTest, mgcv, DHARMa, coxme, survminer, Rmisc, survival, sjstats, ggpmisc, sjPlot, glmmTMB, MASS, tidymv, plot3D, graphics, reshape, reshape2, AICcmodavg, psych, effectsize, TMB, CoxR2

**Note**: The readme file contains the names of each datafile used in our paper, containing all the data relevant to our study. The metadata for each file is provided below, and includes the column names and their descriptions.

**FILES**

**Data and code file overview**

This data repository consist of two code files and six data files.

**Code files**:

1\. sperm storage...,