Meeting Abstract
Understanding the biological pathways causing life-history trade-offs is a challenge of major importance, because it concerns all life including humans. Telomere length potentially provides a unifying window on this problem, because many associations between telomere length and life history traits have been reported in recent years in a variety of species. In this talk I will provide a summarizing overview of current knowledge of associations between telomere length and the major life history components, reproduction and mortality. In this context, a distinction will be made between cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, showing how they differ in the information they provide. Our current knowledge on telomere length heritability will also be summarized. Lastly, I will briefly discuss to what extent the observed associations between life history traits and fitness components are likely to reflect a causal relationship. I will argue that, in the majority of cases, telomere length is probably an index of which the underlying physiological information remains to be identified, without having a direct effect on fitness components, while in exceptional cases telomere length is likely to be causally related to mortality.
