Drivers of longitudinal telomere dynamics in the long-lived bat species, Myotis myotis

Age related telomere shortening is considered a hallmark of the ageing
process. However, a recent cross-sectional ageing study of relative
telomere length (rTL) in bats failed to detect a relationship between rTL
and age in the long-lived genus Myotis (M. myotis and M. bechsteinii),
suggesting some other factors are responsible for driving telomere
dynamics in these species. Here, we test if longitudinal rTL data show
signatures of age-associated telomere attrition in M. myotis and
differentiate which intrinsic or extrinsic factors are likely to drive
telomere length dynamics. Using qPCR, rTL was measured in 504 samples from
a marked population, from Brittany, France, captured between 2013 and
2016. These represent 174 individuals with an age range of 0 to 7+ years.
We find no significant relationship between rTL and age (p = 0.762), but
demonstrate that within-individual rTL is highly variable from year to
year. To investigate the heritability of rTL, a population pedigree
(n=1744) was constructed from genotype data generated from a 16
microsatellite multiplex, designed from an initial, low coverage, Illumina
genome for M. myotis. Heritability was estimated in a Bayesian, mixed
model framework, and showed that little of the observed variance in rTL is
heritable (h2= 0.06 – 0.01). Rather, correlations of first differences,
correlating yearly changes in telomere length and weather variables,
demonstrate that, during the spring transition, average temperature,
minimum temperature, rainfall and windspeed correlate with changes in
longitudinal telomere dynamics. As such, rTL may represent a useful
biomarker to quantify the physiological impact of various environmental
stressors in bats.