Effect of domestication on telomere length
The arithmetic mean TL was 24.8 kb for domesticated species and 20.3 kb for non-domesticated species in the Gomes et al. (2011) dataset. Controlling for phylogenetic non-independence, there was a marginally significant positive trend, towards longer telomeres in domesticated species (βdomestication=0.1467±0.0774, p=0.0633). Telomeres were significantly longer in domesticated species (βdomestication=0.1416±0.0615, p=0.0254) when controlling for telomerase activity, body mass and lifespan (Table 3). Thus, domestication is predicted to increase TL by 38.5% compared to non-domesticated species.
Excluding the nine domesticated species from the analyses presented in Table 1 above did not qualitatively alter our findings (see Table S8), but the positive association between telomerase activity and lifespan was attenuated (βtelomerase activity=0.0034±0.0018, p=0.0703).