A houbara bustard on the Canary IslandsWIMIMEDIA, CHMEE2The houbara bustard (Chlamydotis undulate), a bird that inhabits dry scrublands in Northern Africa, suffers at least one of the downfalls of growing older that may afflict several other animal species: declining reproductive fitness. And researchers studying a decade of data gathered from birds involved in a captive breeding program have provided a quantitative glimpse at just how bad it gets for older bustards, especially males. The international team of scientists published the work this week (February 3) in Nature Communications.
Houbara bustards can live in excess of 20 years, but Brian Preston, a researcher at the University of Bourgogne in France, found that after age 6, both males and females experienced declines in the performance of their respective gametes. Preston’s team analyzed 10 years’ worth of data collected at a Moroccan breeding, where staff had monitored the artificial insemination of more than 1,000 birds, recording egg hatching success and growth in resulting chicks. With bustards ranging in age from 1 to 23, the researchers had a nice spread to search for differences in reproductive success as birds aged.
They found that eggs made from inseminating older females with sperm from older males were less likely to hatch. And they discovered that males that were a ...
