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A Demographic Analysis of the Fitness Cost of Extended Longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans

¹ Department of Nematology, ³ Division of Statistics, and ⁴ Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis.
² Department of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
⁵ Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, University of California, Berkeley.
⁶ Department of Biology, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Address correspondence to Edward P. Caswell-Chen, PhD, Department of Nematology, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail: epcaswell{at}ucdavis.edu

We monitored survival and reproduction of 1000 individuals of Caenorhabditis elegans wild type (N2) and 800 individuals of clk-1 and daf-2, and used biodemographic analysis to address fitness as the integrative consequence of the entire age-specific schedules of survival and reproduction. Relative to N2, the mutants clk-1 and daf-2 extended average life span by 27% and 111%, respectively, but reduced net reproductive rate by 44% and 18%. The net result of differences in survival and fertility was a significant differential in fitness, with both clk-1 ( = 2.74) and daf-2 ( = 3.78) at a disadvantage relative to N2 ( = 3.85). Demographic life table response experiment (LTRE) analysis revealed that the fitness differentials were due to negative effects in mutants on reproduction in the first 6–7 days of life. Fitness costs in clk-1 and daf-2 of C. elegans are consistent with the theory of antagonistic pleiotropy for the evolution of senescence.

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