1. 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. 2. 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...

Population structure is critical to infectious disease transmission. As a result, theoretical and empirical contact networks models of infectious disease spread are increasingly providing valuable insights into wildlife epidemiology. Analysing an exceptionally detailed data set on contact structure within a high-density population of European badgers Meles meles, we show that a modular contact network produced by spatially structured stable social groups, lead to smaller epidemics, particularly for infections with intermediate transmissibility. The key advance is...

Movement of individuals, or their genes, can influence eco-evolutionary processes in structured populations. We have limited understanding of the extent to which spatial behaviour varies among groups and individuals within populations. Here we use genetic pedigree reconstruction in a long-term study of European badgers (Meles meles) to characterise the extent of extra-group paternity, occurring as a consequence of breeding excursions, and to test hypothesised drivers of variation at multiple levels. We jointly estimate parentage and...

The current extinction and climate change crises pressure us to predict population dynamics with ever-greater accuracy. Although predictions rest on the well-advanced theory of age-structured populations, two key issues remain poorly-explored. Specifically, how the age-dependency in demographic rates and the year-to-year interactions between survival and fecundity affect stochastic population growth rates. We use inference, simulations, and mathematical derivations to explore how environmental perturbations determine population growth rates for populations with different age-specific demographic rates and...