TY - JOUR
T1 - Extreme longevity in a deep-sea vestimentiferan tubeworm and its implications for the evolution of life history strategies
AU - Durkin, Alanna
AU - Fisher, Charles R.
AU - Cordes, Erik E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This research was one part of a larger study led by Dr. Jim Brooks of TDI-Brooks that was jointly funded under the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) by the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), contract #0105CT39187, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (NOAA OER). Many thanks to Erin Becker, Jeremy Potter, Liz Goehring, and Cindy Peterson for spending countless hours measuring tubeworms and to Stephanie Lessard-Pilon for her preliminary analysis of the tubeworm tag data. Collecting these tubeworms would not have been possible without the assistance of the captains and crew of the R/V Atlantis and NOAA Ship Ronald Brown and the crew and pilots of the DSV Alvin and ROV Jason II. We would also like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on improving this manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017.
PY - 2017/8
Y1 - 2017/8
N2 - The deep sea is home to many species that have longer life spans than their shallow-water counterparts. This trend is primarily related to the decline in metabolic rates with temperature as depth increases. However, at bathyal depths, t he c ol d-s e e p ve s t i me nt i f e r a n t ube wor m s pe c i e s Lamellibrachia luymesi and Seepiophila jonesi reach ex-tremely old ages beyond what is predicted by the simple scal-ing of life span with body size and temperature. Here, we use individual-based models based on in situ growth rates to show that another species of cold-seep tubeworm found in the Gulf of Mexico, Escarpia laminata, also has an extraordinarily long life span, regularly achieving ages of 100–200 years with some individuals older than 300 years. The distribution of results from individual simulations as well as whole population simulations involving mortality and recruitment rates support these age estimates. The low 0.67% mortality rate mea-surements from collected populations of E. laminata are sim-ilar to mortality rates in L. luymesi and S. jonesi and play a role in evolution of the long life span of cold-seep tubeworms. These results support longevity theory, which states that in the absence of extrinsic mortality threats, natural selection will select for individuals that senesce slower and reproduce con-tinually into their old age.
AB - The deep sea is home to many species that have longer life spans than their shallow-water counterparts. This trend is primarily related to the decline in metabolic rates with temperature as depth increases. However, at bathyal depths, t he c ol d-s e e p ve s t i me nt i f e r a n t ube wor m s pe c i e s Lamellibrachia luymesi and Seepiophila jonesi reach ex-tremely old ages beyond what is predicted by the simple scal-ing of life span with body size and temperature. Here, we use individual-based models based on in situ growth rates to show that another species of cold-seep tubeworm found in the Gulf of Mexico, Escarpia laminata, also has an extraordinarily long life span, regularly achieving ages of 100–200 years with some individuals older than 300 years. The distribution of results from individual simulations as well as whole population simulations involving mortality and recruitment rates support these age estimates. The low 0.67% mortality rate mea-surements from collected populations of E. laminata are sim-ilar to mortality rates in L. luymesi and S. jonesi and play a role in evolution of the long life span of cold-seep tubeworms. These results support longevity theory, which states that in the absence of extrinsic mortality threats, natural selection will select for individuals that senesce slower and reproduce con-tinually into their old age.
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U2 - 10.1007/S00114-017-1479-Z
DO - 10.1007/S00114-017-1479-Z
M3 - Article
C2 - 28689349
AN - SCOPUS:85031699649
SN - 0028-1042
VL - 104
JO - Die Naturwissenschaften
JF - Die Naturwissenschaften
IS - 7-8
M1 - 63
ER -