Do Telomeres Influence Pace‐of‐Life‐Strategies in Response to Environmental Conditions Over a Lifetime and Between Generations?

Telomeres are regions of non‐coding DNA at the end of eukaryotic chromosomes that shorten at each cell division, resulting in shorter telomeres in older organisms. Under the telomere messenger hypothesis, telomeres would gather information about the environmental factors that cause oxidative damage, inflammation, and physiological stress within the organism, and relate this information to the lifespan of the organism and its pace‐of‐life strategy.

The complexity of the physiological phenotype currently prevents us from identifying an integrative measure to assess how the internal state and environmental conditions modify life‐history strategies. In this article, it is proposed that shorter telomeres should lead to a faster pace‐of‐life where investment in self‐maintenance is decreased as a means of saving energy for reproduction, but at the cost of somatic durability. Inversely, longer telomeres would favor an increased investment in soma maintenance and thus a longer reproductive lifespan (i.e., slower pace‐of‐life). Under this hypothesis, telomere dynamics could be such an integrative mediator, which will assemble the information about oxidative stress levels, inflammation status and stress reactivity, and relate this information to the potential lifespan of the organism and its pace‐of‐life strategy. The signaling function of telomere dynamics can also reach over generations, a phenomenon in which the telomere lengths of gametes would provide a channel through which offspring would receive information about their environment early in their development, hence increasing the possibilities for developmental plasticity.

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