“…In agreement with other studies (Wilbourn et al, ), we found that longer telomere length, corrected for age, predicted a longer remaining lifespan and a lower mortality hazard in adults. Combined with the high within‐individual repeatability in telomere length, this raises the intriguing question of whether an individual's telomere length and lifespan are already partly determined early in life (Eastwood et al, ; Heidinger et al, ). In the same colony of common terns, we were previously unable to identify environmental factors that affected telomere length after hatching (Vedder, Verhulst, et al, ), but conditions during embryonic development (Vedder et al, ), as well as paternal age (Bouwhuis, Verhulst, Bauch, & Vedder, ; see also Bauch, Boonekamp, Korsten, Mulder, & Verhulst, for a longitudinal study in jackdaws Corvus monedula ), affected telomere length in common tern chicks.…”