Juan Diego Ibáñez-Álamo, Javier Pineda-Pampliega, Robert L. Thomson, José I. Aguirre, Alazne Díez-Fernández, Bruno Faivre, Jordi Figuerola, Simon Verhulst
Abstract
Urbanization, one of the most extreme human-induced environmental changes, represents a major challenge for many organisms. Anthropogenic habitats can have opposing effects on different fitness components, for example, by decreasing starvation risk but also health status. Assessment of the net fitness effect of anthropogenic habitats is therefore difficult. Telomere length is associated with phenotypic quality and mortality rate in many species, and the rate of telomere shortening is considered an integrative measure of the 'life stress' experienced by an individual. This makes telomere length a promising candidate for examining the effects of urbanization on the health status of individuals. We investigated whether telomere length differed between urban and forest-dwelling common blackbirds (Turdus merula). Using the terminal restriction fragment assay, we analysed telomere length in yearlings and older adults from five population dyads (urban versus forest) across Europe. In both age classes, urban blackbirds had significantly shorter telomeres (547 bp) than blackbirds in natural habitats, indicating lower health status in urban blackbirds. We propose several potential hypotheses to explain our results. Our findings show that even successful city dwellers such as blackbirds pay a price for living in these anthropogenic habitats.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 556. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 June 2022.
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Altmetric has tracked 26,222,113 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
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