About the Project

The SNAP: Sex aNd Aging Project is a part of IISAGE, a NSF-funded Biological Integration Institute focused on unraveling the mechanisms of sex-specific aging across animal taxa.

The IISAGE project includes several species of interest to pet hobbyists, providing a unique opportunity to engage with this community. Pets are an important, often underutilized, source of scientific data, including data related to aging and longevity. Unconventional pets like fish, amphibians, and reptiles frequently lack robust longevity or demographic data in the literature. Some pet hobbyists keep extensive breeding records, attend meetings with other breeders, interact with the pet industry, and maintain endangered species. However, typically, they are not engaged with scientists working on their species group of interest. IISAGE will engage with pet hobbyist groups focused on Poeciliid fishes and reptiles by establishing a citizen science project to collect currently lacking life history data. These data will be integrated with those collected by IISAGE scientists, allowing us to greatly expand the database for these species. Quality assurance and quality control of citizen science acquired data will be monitored in accordance with the Data Quality Resources for Citizen and Community Science table.

To facilitate data collection by community scientists, we will produce a “scale” sticker that will be provided to hobbyists along with a rubric outlining proper use of the sticker for the collection of data.

Data to be collected will include: species name, known age (date of hatch/birth), sex, photo or short video containing sticker scale in view. For the poeciliid fishes, we are interested in lifespan and growth data, as well as the reported masculinization in phenotypes associated with aging. Sex-specific phenotypes are exemplified in capture-bred poeciliid fishes that are artificially sexually-selected for breeding for various traits (ornamental fins, coloration, size, behavior, etc.). Demographic data collected for poeciliid pet fish will be integrated into ML analyses. For the reptile species, IISAGE is interested in longevity, growth, and sexual dimorphisms data.