Age clock may track development in wild Soay sheep
Models built from body measurements collected from 1985 to 2024 linked higher predicted ages relative to actual age with better winter survival in adult sheep.
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Biomarkers- Studied:
- Experiments in sheep
Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Wild Soay sheep on Hirta, Scotland, provided physical measurements collected from 1985 to 2024 for a modeling study of age-prediction clocks. Researchers built separate models for males and females, comparing physical traits, behavior and measurements from blood and feces.
Clocks based on traits such as weight, teeth and leg length predicted age most accurately. Their accuracy declined in later adulthood. In sheep aged two years and older, heavier-born animals tended to have higher predicted ages relative to their actual ages. Higher predicted ages relative to actual age were also associated with better survival through the following winter. The authors suggest that these clocks may reflect the pace of development rather than senescence, the deterioration that comes with age.
Why it matters
Routinely collected animal measurements may offer a practical alternative when other aging clocks are difficult to build. Distinguishing development from later-life decline matters for interpreting what these tools say about aging.
Caveats
The clocks increasingly underestimated age from around five years onward, complicating interpretation of age-estimation gaps in older sheep. The results came from one wild Soay sheep population.
- Early environmental conditions
- Modeling and theory
- Birth weight
- Morphological aging clock
- Phenotypic age deviation
- Sheep
The paper
A phenotype-based ageing clock that reflects development rather than senescence in a wild mammal
The University of Sheffield 1; The University of Edinburgh 3
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Nov 12, 2026, Open access, CC BY
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