Nature Communications (Mar 2019)

Breeders that receive help age more slowly in a cooperatively breeding bird

  • Martijn Hammers,
  • Sjouke A. Kingma,
  • Lewis G. Spurgin,
  • Kat Bebbington,
  • Hannah L. Dugdale,
  • Terry Burke,
  • Jan Komdeur,
  • David S. Richardson

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09229-3
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 10

Abstract

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Sociality explains substantial variation in ageing across species, but less is known about this relationship within species. Here, the authors show that female dominant Seychelles warblers with helpers at the nest have higher late-life survival and lower telomere attrition and the probability of having helpers increases with age.