Authors: H Holand T Kvalnes M Gamelon J Tufto H Jensen H Pärn T H Ringsby BE Sæther
Publish Date: 2016/03/31
Volume: 181, Issue: 3, Pages: 865-871
Abstract
Investigating factors which affect the decline in survival with age ie actuarial senescence is important in order to understand how demographic rates vary in wild populations Although the evidence for the occurrence of actuarial senescence in wild populations is growing very few studies have compared actuarial senescence rates between wild populations of the same species We used data from a longtime study of demography of house sparrows Passer domesticus to investigate differences in rates of actuarial senescence between habitats and subpopulations We also investigated whether rates of actuarial senescence differed between males and females We found that rates of actuarial senescence showed large spatial variation We also found that the onset of actuarial senescence varied between subpopulations However these differences were not significantly explained by a general difference in habitat type We also found no significant difference in actuarial senescence rates between males and females This study shows that senescence rates in natural populations may vary significantly between subpopulations and that failing to account for such differences may give a biased estimate of senescence rates of a speciesWe would like to thank everyone involved in the House Sparrow Project for help with fieldwork We are also grateful to everyone at Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics at the Department of Biology NTNU for helpful comments and help with statistics in R This study was supported by Grants from the Research Council of Norway FRIMEDBIO 204303 and 221956 SFF 223257 the European Research Council ERC2010AdG 268562 and NTNU The research was carried out in accordance with permits from the Norwegian Environment Agency and the Bird Ringing Centre at Stavanger Museum NorwayH H wrote the manuscript H H T K H J H P T H R contributed to field work and data collection H H T K J T conducted the analysis H H T H R B E S conceived the study All authors contributed to the interpretation of results and revisions of the manuscript
Keywords: