Evolution of differential maternal age effects on male and female offspring development and longevity

1. Maternal age effects on life-history traits, including longevity, are widespread and can be seen as a manifestation of ageing. However, little is known about how maternal lifespan may influence the maternal age effect. At a given chronological age, a long-lived parent may be at a younger biological age than a short-lived parent, and thus have a less severe parental age effect. However, earlier work using experimentally evolved short- and long-lived lines did not support this hypothesis. 2. We scored developmental time and longevity of 14995 individual seed beetles, Callosobruchus maculatus derived from replicate short-lived and long-lived lines created via artificial selection on male lifespan. 3. Offspring from older mothers had shorter lifespan, which is consistent with most of the literature. 4. We found support for the hypothesis that detrimental maternal age effects evolve to be weaker under selection for long lifespan. However, this finding was only apparent in males, suggestin...