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 reproductive seasons. Our
study adds to the growing literature suggesting that negative effects of
parental age on offspring fitness may not be as prevalent as once thought,
particularly in wild populations.