Maternal age effects on offspring lifespan and reproduction vary within a species

Across diverse taxa, offspring from older mothers have decreased lifespan and fitness. Little is known about the extent to which maternal age effects vary among genotypes for a given species, however, except for studies of a few arthropod species. To investigate the presence and degree of intraspecific variability in maternal age effects, we compared lifespan, reproductive schedule, and lifetime reproductive output of offspring produced by young, middle-aged, and old mothers in four strains of rotifers in the Brachionus plicatilis species complex. We found significant variability among strains in the magnitude and direction of maternal age effects on offspring life history traits. In one strain, offspring of young mothers lived 20% longer than offspring of old mothers, whereas there were no significant effects of maternal age on lifespan for other strains. Depending on strain, advanced maternal age had positive effects, negative effects, or no effect on lifetime reproductive output. Acr..., , , # Data from: Maternal age effects on offspring lifespan and reproduction vary within a species

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.b2rbnzspp](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.b2rbnzspp)

## Description of the data and file structure

Details for raw data files:

**‘survival.csv’ contains survivorship data over time.**

There is a column for each day of the experiment (1-28), and each row contains data for a single individual.

‘1’ indicates that the individual was alive on that day

‘0’ indicates that the individual was dead on that day

‘NA’ indicates that the individual was lost, due to issues with transferring, or other mistakes (we do not know the survivorship status)

The ‘censor’ column indicates whether or not the event of interest (death) occurred within the experiment timeframe. ‘1’ indicates that death was observed, ‘0’ indicates that death was not observed, therefore that individual is censored.

Variables include:

**‘generation’** : F0, F1

**‘maternal_age’** : young, mid, and old...,