Meeting Abstract
The environment that developing embryos experience influences organismal fitness by affecting phenotypic trajectories and survival. The shortening of telomeres with chronological age is related to biological aging and functional declines. Telomere dynamics are also associated with lifespan, reproductive output, and individual quality; thus, telomere length may be informative of an organism’s fitness overall. However, the question of how developmental environments influence aging trajectories is relatively unexplored. Here, we aimed to understand how environmentally relevant temperature fluctuations and exposure to the endocrine disrupting chemical, dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), affects telomere length in developing American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis). The incubation environment was manipulated to be either at a constant male-, female-, or intermediate-promoting temperature or following fluctuations observed in natural nests. Further, half of the embryos received an external dose of DDE just before gonadal differentiation. Neonatal alligators were hatched and growth was monitored for 10 days prior to taking a blood sample. The absolute average telomere length of red blood cells was quantified through the quantitative polymerase chain reaction using a single copy gene (sox9) to produce a ratio of telomere sequence abundance to single copy gene abundance (T/S ratio). We report our findings regarding how the developmental environment influences telomere length in hatchling alligators and predict how that might represent general quality and long-term health and survival. This study advances our understanding of long-term consequences of the developmental environment and insights for conservation for this species in a rapidly changing world.
