Alice Dalla Pietà

Project: Social Ageing: Social environment effects on senescence, using an epigenetic clock

The phenotypes of organisms are shaped by their social environment, which influences access to resources, life-history trade-offs, stress, and ultimately their senescence. However, little is known about how sociality changes in later life, or how it impacts fitness and senescence in wild populations. Senescence is usually quantified using chronological age, but this can differ from biological age (somatic functionality). Using the long-term longitudinal dataset of the cooperatively breeding Seychelles warbler, where social environments and fitness are known across entire lifetimes, and a biobank enables measurement of biological age with an epigenetic clock. Alice will use biological age to quantify the senescence of sociality, estimate genotype-by-age effects and selection on sociality, and assess how social environments influence ageing.