Summary The lack of consensus concerning the impact of telomere length (TL) dynamics on survival emphasizes the need for additional studies to evaluate the effect of TL on key life‐history processes. Using both cross‐sectional and longitudinal data, we therefore explored age‐specific TL dynamics in a squamate reptile: the frillneck lizard (Chlamydosaurus kingii). Our cross‐sectional analyses revealed that young lizards had short TL, TL increased in medium‐aged lizards, but TL decreased in older age cohorts, revealing a curvilinear relationship between TL and frillneck lizard age. Neither our cross‐sectional nor our longitudinal analyses revealed any association between TL dynamics and lizard survival. We observed a significant positive relationship between TL and telomerase expression (TE), suggesting that TE is a significant determinant of frillneck lizard TL dynamics. Importantly, our longitudinal analyses revealed a positive relationship between initial TL and telomere attrition rate within individual lizards, that is lizards with short initial telomeres were subjected to reduced telomere attrition rates compared to lizards with long initial TL. Our results strongly suggest that TL and TE dynamics in frillneck lizards is not associated with lizard survival but rather reflect an adaptation to maintain TL above a critical minimum length in order to sustain cellular homeostasis. A http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12764/suppinfo is available for this article.

Animal movement is multidimensional and complex, and to understand the motor system of wild animals in the context of their natural ecology, we must analyse how suites of performance traits both mutualistically and antagonistically affect function—a necessity highlighted by previous work on performance trade‐offs. Evidence from some studies of human athletes using multidimensional analyses of performance suggests that overall quality among individuals can mask functional trade‐offs within them, yet no studies have tested this idea using wild animals. In this study, we investigated the possible mutualistic and antagonistic associations among eight different whole‐animal performance traits in male and female northern quolls (Dasyurus hallucatus). We detected trade‐offs between pairs of performance traits when conducted on raw standardized data using both Pearson product moment correlations and partial correlation analyses. For example, grasp strength was negatively associated with beam‐running speed using both analyses, suggesting that morphological designs that enhance grasp strength simultaneously compromise an animal's motor control or stability on a narrow beam. In addition, we detected a trade‐off between two distinct sets of performance traits; grasp strength, bite force and maximum oxygen consumption were negatively associated with jump acceleration and beam‐running speed. This trade‐off between sets of performance traits accounted for around one‐third of the total variance in performance among individuals and was primarily driven by the effects of body size on both groups of traits. Larger body sizes improved grasp strength, bite forces and maximum oxygen consumption rates but decreased jump accelerations and beam‐running speeds. Because the first component of a principal component analysis based on all eight performance traits (PCP1) did not load in the same direction for all traits, PCP1 did not represent an overall metric of motor performance—which differs from previous multivariate analyses of human physical performance. Our study highlights the importance of studying suites of traits when exploring the functional phenotype of organisms rather than just one or two dimensions of performance. A http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13115/suppinfo is available for this article.