Prominent differences in aging among and within species present an evolutionary puzzle. The theories proposed to explain evolutionary differences in aging are based on the axiom that selection maximizes fitness, not necessarily lifespan. This implies trade-offs between investment into self-maintenance and investment into reproduction, where high investment into growth and current reproduction are associated with short lifespans. Fast growth and large adult size are related with shorter lifespans in the domestic dog, a bourgeoning model in aging research, however, whether reproduction influences lifespan in this system remains unknown. Here we test the relationship between reproduction and differences in lifespan among dog breeds, controlling simultaneously for shared ancestry and recent gene flow. We found that shared ancestry explains a higher proportion of the among-breed variation in life history traits, in comparison with recent gene flow. Our results also show that reproductive investment negatively impacts lifespan, and more strongly so in large breeds, an effect that is not merely a correlated response of adult size. These results suggest that basic life history trade-offs are apparent in a domestic animal whose diversity is the result of artificial selection and that among-breed differences in lifespan are due to a combination of size and reproduction.

Data were collected from published sources (citations of these appear in the README file) and from the website of the American Kennel Club (AKC). To curate the data, we ran a series of comparisons (Pearson correlation analyses) to ensure repeatability among sources (for details, see the methods section of the article).

This dataset accompanies the article "High investment into reproduction is associated with reduced lifespan in dogs" published in The American Naturalist.

R Program for Statistical Computing. R Core Team (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.