Animal life history is shaped by the pace of life and the distribution of age-specific mortality and reproduction

Evolution drives, and is driven by, demography. A genotype moulds its phenotype's age patterns of mortality and fertility in an environment; these two patterns in turn determine the genotype's fitness in that environment. Hence, to understand the evolution of ageing, age patterns of mortality and reproduction need to be compared for species across the tree of life. However, few studies have done so and only for a limited range of taxa. Here we contrast standardized patterns over age for 11 mammals, 12 other vertebrates, 10 invertebrates, 12 vascular plants and a green alga. Although it has been predicted that evolution should inevitably lead to increasing mortality and declining fertility with age after maturity, there is great variation among these species, including increasing, constant, decreasing, humped and bowed trajectories for both long- and short-lived species. This diversity challenges theoreticians to develop broader perspectives on the evolution of ageing and empiricists to study the demography of more species.

Longevity is a major characteristic of animals that has long fascinated scientists. In this work, we present a comprehensive database of animal longevity records and related life-history traits entitled AnAge, which we compiled and manually curated from an extensive literature. AnAge started as a collection of longevity records, but has since been expanded to include quantitative data for numerous other life-history traits, including body masses at different developmental stages, reproductive data such as age at sexual maturity and measurements of reproductive output, and physiological traits related to metabolism. AnAge features over 4000 vertebrate species and is a central resource for applying the comparative method to studies of longevity and life-history evolution across the tree of life. Moreover, by providing a reference value for longevity and other life-history traits, AnAge can prove valuable to a broad range of biologists working in evolutionary biology, ecology, zoology, physiology and conservation biology. AnAge is freely available online (http://genomics.senescence.info/species/).