Meeting Abstract
115.4 Monday, Jan. 7 Sex-specific aging of performance in male and female professional basketball players LAILVAUX, SP*; WILSON, R; KASUMOVIC, MM; University of New Orleans; University of Queensland; University of New South Wales slailvaux@gmail.com
The expression of phenotypic traits is often influenced by dynamic resource allocation trade-offs which, when occurring over the course of individual lifespans, may be manifest as trait aging. Although aging has been studied for a variety of traits that are closely tied to reproduction or reproductive effort, the aging of multiple traits related to fitness in other ways are less well understood. We took advantage of almost 30 years of data on human whole-organism performance in the National Basketball Association to examine trends of aging in performance traits related to speed, endurance and accuracy. Given that patterns of aging are known to differ between sexes in other animal species, we also analysed a smaller dataset on players in the Women’s National Basketball Association to test for potential sex differences in the aging of comparable traits. Finally, we tested the hypothesis that different aspects of performance trade-off as individuals age. These data suggest that the aging of performance traits used in basketball is generally characterised by senescence in males, whereas females show evidence of terminal investment in performance.
