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Inbreeding intensifies sex‐ and age‐dependent disease in a wild mammal

The mutation accumulation theory of senescence predicts that age-related deterioration of fitness can be exaggerated when inbreeding causes homozygosity for deleterious alleles. A vital component of fitness, in natural populations, is the incidence and progression of disease. Evidence is growing for natural links between inbreeding and ageing; between inbreeding and disease; between sex and ageing; and between sex and disease. However, there is scant evidence, to date, for links among age, disease, inbreeding and sex in a single natural population. Using ecological and epidemiological data from a long-term longitudinal field study, we show that in wild European badgers (Meles meles) exposed naturally to bovine tuberculosis (bTB), inbreeding (measured as multilocus homozygosity) intensifies a positive correlation between age and evidence of …

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