Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · January 2025
In vertebrates, glucocorticoids can be upregulated in response to both psychosocial and energetic stressors, making it difficult to identify the cause of elevated glucocorticoid concentrations when both types of stressors are present. This problem has been ...
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Journal ArticleGeroScience · October 2024
Biological aging is near-ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but its timing and pace vary between individuals and over lifespans. Prospective, individual-based studies of wild animals-especially non-human primates-help identify the social and environmental d ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal behaviour · August 2024
The Vandenbergh effect, or male-mediated maturation, occurs when females reach sexual maturation upon exposure to a novel male. Male-mediated maturation is found across mammals, including in geladas, Theropithecus gelada, where it may be an adaptive ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · May 2024
How female mammals adapt metabolically in response to environmental variation remains understudied in the wild, because direct measures of metabolic activity are difficult to obtain in wild populations. However, recent advances in the non-invasive measurem ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · March 2024
The early-life environment can profoundly shape the trajectory of an animal's life, even years or decades later. One mechanism proposed to contribute to these early-life effects is DNA methylation. However, the frequency and functional importance of DNA me ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of biological anthropology · November 2023
ObjectivesIn many taxa, adverse early-life environments are associated with reduced growth and smaller body size in adulthood. However, in wild primates, we know very little about whether, where, and to what degree trajectories are influenced by e ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · November 2023
Affiliative social bonds are linked to fitness components in many social mammals. However, despite their importance, little is known about how the tendency to form social bonds develops in young animals, or if the timing of development is heritable and thu ...
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Journal ArticleThe American naturalist · October 2023
AbstractOver the past 50 years, a wealth of testable, often conflicting hypotheses have been generated about the evolution of offspring sex ratio manipulation by mothers. Several of these hypotheses have received support in studies of invertebrates and som ...
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Journal ArticleNeuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · September 2023
Field studies of natural mammal populations present powerful opportunities to investigate the determinants of health and aging using fine-grained observations of known individuals across the life course. Here, we synthesize five decades of findings from on ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of agricultural, biological, and environmental statistics · June 2023
In animal behavior studies, a common goal is to investigate the causal pathways between an exposure and outcome, and a mediator that lies in between. Causal mediation analysis provides a principled approach for such studies. Although many applications invo ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution · June 2023
Affiliative social behaviors are linked to fitness components in multiple species. However, the role of genetic variance in shaping such behaviors remains largely unknown, limiting our understanding of how affiliative behaviors can respond to natural selec ...
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Dataset · May 15, 2023
Harsh early life environments are linked to a variety of negative outcomes in humans and non-human primates, including poor survival in adulthood. Understanding the pathways that drive the relationship between early life adversity and reduced survival is k ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · May 2023
Ecological relationships between bacteria mediate the services that gut microbiomes provide to their hosts. Knowing the overall direction and strength of these relationships is essential to learn how ecology scales up to affect microbiome assembly, dynamic ...
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Journal ArticleScience advances · May 2023
Adverse conditions in early life can have negative consequences for adult health and survival in humans and other animals. What variables mediate the relationship between early adversity and adult survival? Adult social environments represent one candidate ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of biological anthropology · April 2023
ObjectivesPregnancy failure represents a major fitness cost for any mammal, particularly those with slow life histories such as primates. Here, we quantified the risk of fetal loss in wild hybrid baboons, including genetic, ecological, and demogra ...
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Dataset · February 15, 2023
Adverse conditions in early life can have profound negative consequences for adult health and survival in humans and other animals. How does early adversity exert its influence on adult outcomes, and what variables mediate this relationship? Adult social e ...
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Dataset · December 6, 2022
Across taxa, adverse early-life environments such as drought and psychosocial stress are associated with reduced growth and smaller body size in adulthood. However, in wild primates, we know very little about whether and to what extent individuals grow pla ...
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Journal ArticleNature ecology & evolution · November 2022
The ultimate payoff of behaviours depends not only on their direct impact on an individual, but also on the impact on their relatives. Local relatedness-the average relatedness of an individual to their social environment-therefore has profound effects on ...
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Journal ArticleBiological Conservation · October 1, 2022
Most animal habitats are affected by humans. While some species tolerate and even benefit from these changes, others suffer. Understanding when and how human-altered landscapes affect animal behavior, health, reproduction, and survival is essential to spec ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · August 2022
Genetic admixture is central to primate evolution. We combined 50 years of field observations of immigration and group demography with genomic data from ~9 generations of hybrid baboons to investigate the consequences of admixture in the wild. Despite no o ...
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Journal ArticleNature ecology & evolution · July 2022
Human gut microbial dynamics are highly individualized, making it challenging to link microbiota to health and to design universal microbiome therapies. This individuality is typically attributed to variation in host genetics, diets, environments and medic ...
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Journal ArticleMammalian Biology · June 1, 2022
Parallel-laser photogrammetry is growing in popularity as a way to collect non-invasive body size data from wild mammals. Despite its many appeals, this method requires researchers to hand-measure (i) the pixel distance between the parallel laser spots (in ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 2022
Age-related changes in fertility have increasingly been documented in wild animal populations: In many species the youngest and oldest reproducers are disadvantaged relative to prime adults. How do these effects evolve, and what explains their diversity ac ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · May 2022
The rate of adaptive evolution, the contribution of selection to genetic changes that increase mean fitness, is determined by the additive genetic variance in individual relative fitness. To date, there are few robust estimates of this parameter for natura ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent biology : CB · April 2022
Inbreeding often imposes net fitness costs,1-5 leading to the expectation that animals will engage in inbreeding avoidance when the costs of doing so are not prohibitive.4-9 However, one recent meta-analysis indicates that animals of ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · February 2022
The social environment is a major determinant of morbidity, mortality and Darwinian fitness in social animals. Recent studies have begun to uncover the molecular processes associated with these relationships, but the degree to which they vary across differ ...
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Dataset · January 18, 2022
Inbreeding often imposes net fitness costs, leading to the expectation that animals will engage in inbreeding avoidance when the costs of doing so are not prohibitive. However, one recent meta-analysis indicates that animals of many species do not avoid ma ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · December 2021
Many social groups are made up of complex social networks in which each individual associates with a distinct subset of its groupmates. If social groups become larger over time, competition often leads to a permanent group fission. During such fissions, co ...
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Journal ArticleMammal Review · October 1, 2021
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Bartoš et al. (2021; Mammal Review 51: 143–153; https://doi.org/10.1111/mam.12219) reviewed the mechanisms involved in the ‘Bruce effect’ – a phenomenon originally documented in inseminated female house mice Mus musculus, who block pregnancy following expo ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal behaviour · October 2021
Opposite-sex social relationships are important predictors of fitness in many animals, including several group-living mammals. Consequently, understanding sources of variance in the tendency to form opposite-sex relationships is important for understanding ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · September 7, 2021
Correction to Supporting Information for “Dominance rank-associated gene expression is widespread, sex-specific, and a precursor to high social status in wild male baboons,” by Amanda J. Lea, Mercy Y. Akinyi, Ruth Nyakundi, Peter Mareri, Fred Nyundo, Thoma ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · July 2021
Relatives have more similar gut microbiomes than nonrelatives, but the degree to which this similarity results from shared genotypes versus shared environments has been controversial. Here, we leveraged 16,234 gut microbiome profiles, collected over 14 yea ...
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Dataset · June 3, 2021
Opposite-sex social relationships are important predictors of fitness in many animals, including several group-living mammals. Consequently, understanding sources of variance in the tendency to form opposite-sex relationships is important for understanding ...
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Journal ArticleNature communications · June 2021
Is it possible to slow the rate of ageing, or do biological constraints limit its plasticity? We test the 'invariant rate of ageing' hypothesis, which posits that the rate of ageing is relatively fixed within species, with a collection of 39 human and nonh ...
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Journal ArticleAnnals of Applied Statistics · June 1, 2021
Causal mediation analysis seeks to investigate how the treatment effect of an exposure on outcomes is mediated through intermediate variables. Although many applications involve longitudinal data, the existing methods are not directly applicable to setting ...
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Dataset · May 19, 2021
Many social groups are made up of complex social networks in which each individual tends to associate with a distinct subset of its groupmates. If social groups increase in size over time, competition often leads to permanent group fission. During such fis ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · April 2021
Aging, for virtually all life, is inescapable. However, within populations, biological aging rates vary. Understanding sources of variation in this process is central to understanding the biodemography of natural populations. We constructed a DNA methylati ...
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Journal ArticleScience advances · April 2021
Are differences in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation across the adult life span linked to differences in survival? This question has been the subject of considerable debate. We analyze the link between survival and fecal glucocorticoid ( ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2021
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Primate offspring often depend on their mothers well beyond the age of weaning, and offspring that experience maternal death in early life can suffer substantial reductions in fitness across the life span. Here, we leverage data from eight wild primate pop ...
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Journal Article · 2021
Admixture has profoundly influenced evolution across the tree of life, including in humans and other primates 1,2 . However, we have limited insight into the genetic and phenotypic consequences of admixture in primates, especially during its key early stag ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · November 2020
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People who are more socially integrated or have higher socio-economic status live longer. Recent studies in non-human primates show striking convergences with this human pattern: female primates with more social partners, stronger social bonds or higher do ...
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Dataset · October 26, 2020
Primate offspring often depend on their mothers well beyond the age of weaning, and offspring that experience maternal death in early life can suffer substantial reductions in fitness across the lifespan. Here we leverage data from eight wild primate popul ...
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Dataset · October 26, 2020
Primate offspring often depend on their mothers well beyond the age of weaning, and offspring that experience maternal death in early life can suffer substantial reductions in fitness across the lifespan. Here we leverage data from eight wild primate popul ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2020
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In humans and other long-lived species, harsh conditions in early life often lead to profound differences in adult life expectancy. In response, natural selection is expected to accelerate the timing and pace of reproduction in individuals who experience s ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · September 2020
In vertebrates, glucocorticoid secretion occurs in response to energetic and psychosocial stressors that trigger the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Measuring glucocorticoid concentrations can therefore shed light on the stressors associated wit ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · September 2020
Across group-living animals, linear dominance hierarchies lead to disparities in access to resources, health outcomes and reproductive performance. Studies of how dominance rank predicts these traits typically employ one of several dominance rank metrics w ...
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Journal ArticleConservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · August 2020
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Accurately quantifying species' area requirements is a prerequisite for effective area-based conservation. This typically involves collecting tracking data on species of interest and then conducting home-range analyses. Problematically, autocorrelation in ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2020
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In humans and other animals, harsh conditions in early life can have profound effects on adult physiology, including the stress response. This relationship may be mediated by a lack of supportive relationships in adulthood. That is, early life adversity ma ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · May 2020
The social environment, both in early life and adulthood, is one of the strongest predictors of morbidity and mortality risk in humans. Evidence from long-term studies of other social mammals indicates that this relationship is similar across many species. ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · February 2020
Ecoimmunological patterns and processes remain understudied in wild primates, in part because of the lack of noninvasive methods to measure immunity. Secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) is the most abundant antibody present at mammalian mucosal surfaces and ...
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Journal Article · 2020
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ABSTRACT Opposite-sex social relationships are important predictors of fitness in many animals, including several group-living mammals. Consequently, understanding sources of variance in the tendency to form opposite-sex relationships is important ...
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Journal Article · 2020
Aging, for virtually all life, is inescapable. However, within populations, biological aging rates vary. Understanding sources of variation in this process is central to understanding the biodemography of natural populations. We constructed a DNA methylati ...
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Journal ArticleThe American naturalist · December 2019
Understanding the evolution of life histories requires information on how life histories vary among individuals and how such variation predicts individual fitness. Using complete life histories for females in a well-studied population of wild baboons, we t ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · November 2019
Baboons, members of the genus Papio, comprise six closely related species distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa and southwest Arabia. The species exhibit more ecological flexibility and a wider range of social systems than many other primates. T ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · October 1, 2019
Abstract: Several factors are thought to shape male parasite risk in polygynous and polygynandrous mammals, including male-male competition, investment in potentially immunosuppressive hormones, and dispersal. Parasitism is also driven by processes occurri ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · September 2019
Early life adversity can affect an individual's health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual's offspring is not well understood. W ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · September 1, 2019
Early life adversity can affect an individual’s health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual’s offspring is not well understood. W ...
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Journal ArticleThe Journal of animal ecology · July 2019
Helminth parasites can have wide-ranging, detrimental effects on host reproduction and survival. These effects are best documented in humans and domestic animals, while only a few studies in wild mammals have identified both the forces that drive helminth ...
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Journal ArticleEcological Monographs · May 1, 2019
Home range estimation is routine practice in ecological research. While advances in animal tracking technology have increased our capacity to collect data to support home range analysis, these same advances have also resulted in increasingly autocorrelated ...
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Journal ArticleEvolutionary anthropology · May 2019
Sexually selected infanticide has been the subject of intense empirical and theoretical study for decades; a related phenomenon, male-mediated prenatal loss, has received much less attention in evolutionary studies. Male-mediated prenatal loss occurs when ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · April 2019
Gut microbiota in geographically isolated host populations are often distinct. These differences have been attributed to between-population differences in host behaviours, environments, genetics and geographical distance. However, which factors are most im ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Primatology · February 15, 2019
Admixture between diverging taxa has made, and continues to make, an important contribution to primate diversity and evolution. However, although naturally occurring hybrids have now been documented in all major primate lineages, we still know relatively l ...
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Journal ArticleEcology letters · February 2019
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 ...
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Journal ArticleThe Journal of animal ecology · January 2019
For social species, the environment has two components: physical and social. The social environment modifies the individual's interaction with the physical environment, and the physical environment may in turn impact individuals' social relationships. This ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2019
The term ‘Mating system’ refers to an aggregate set of features for a species or population related to mating and reproduction. Across animal taxa, these features sort in predictable ways, resulting in only a handful of different types of mating systems, e ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2019
The term ‘Mating system’ refers to an aggregate set of features for a species or population related to mating and reproduction. Across animal taxa, these features sort in predictable ways, resulting in only a handful of different types of mating systems, e ...
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Journal ArticleNat Microbiol · December 2018
Resource limitation is a fundamental factor governing the composition and function of ecological communities. However, the role of resource supply in structuring the intestinal microbiome has not been established and represents a challenge for mammals that ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · December 2018
In humans and other hierarchical species, social status is tightly linked to variation in health and fitness-related traits. Experimental manipulations of social status in female rhesus macaques suggest that this relationship is partially explained by stat ...
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Journal ArticleGeneral and comparative endocrinology · May 2018
Understanding how environmental and social factors affect reproduction through variation in energetic condition remains understudied in wild animals, in large part because accurately and repeatedly measuring energetic condition in the wild is a challenge. ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of physical anthropology · May 2018
ObjectivesInterbirth intervals (IBIs) are a key metric of female reproductive success; understanding how they are regulated by environmental, social, and demographic factors can provide insight into sources of variance in female fitness.Materi ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · January 2018
Animal movement is fundamental for ecosystem functioning and species survival, yet the effects of the anthropogenic footprint on animal movements have not been estimated across species. Using a unique GPS-tracking database of 803 individuals across 57 spec ...
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Journal Article · 2018
ABSTRACT In humans and other hierarchical species, social status is tightly linked to variation in health and fitness-related traits. Experimental manipulations of social status in female rhesus macaques suggest that this relationship is partially ...
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Journal ArticleGlobal change biology · November 2017
Earth's rapidly changing climate creates a growing need to understand how demographic processes in natural populations are affected by climate variability, particularly among organisms threatened by extinction. Long-term, large-scale, and cross-taxon studi ...
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Journal ArticleIntegrative and comparative biology · October 2017
The mammalian gut microbiome plays a profound role in the physiology, metabolism, and overall health of its host. However, biologists have only a nascent understanding of the forces that drive inter-individual heterogeneity in gut microbial composition, es ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · August 2017
In many mammals, maturational milestones such as dispersal and the attainment of adult dominance rank mark stages in the onset of reproductive activity and depend on a coordinated set of hormonal and socio-behavioral changes. Studies that focus on the link ...
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Journal ArticleMicrobiome · January 2017
BackgroundThe vaginal microbiome is an important site of bacterial-mammalian symbiosis. This symbiosis is currently best characterized for humans, where lactobacilli dominate the microbial community and may help defend women against infectious dis ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · January 2017
Sexually selected feticide-the death of infants in utero as a result of male behaviour-has only rarely been described or analysed, although it is presumed to be favoured by the same selective pressures that favour sexually selected infanticide. To test thi ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution, medicine, and public health · January 2017
Early life experiences can have profound and persistent effects on traits expressed throughout the life course, with consequences for later life behavior, disease risk, and mortality rates. The shaping of later life traits by early life environments, known ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · November 2016
The human lifespan has traversed a long evolutionary and historical path, from short-lived primate ancestors to contemporary Japan, Sweden, and other longevity frontrunners. Analyzing this trajectory is crucial for understanding biological and sociocultura ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · July 2016
Naturally occurring admixture has now been documented in every major primate lineage, suggesting its key role in primate evolutionary history. Active primate hybrid zones can provide valuable insight into this process. Here, we investigate the history of a ...
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Journal ArticleGenetics · June 2016
Research on the genetics of natural populations was revolutionized in the 1990s by methods for genotyping noninvasively collected samples. However, these methods have remained largely unchanged for the past 20 years and lag far behind the genomics era. To ...
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Journal ArticleEnvironmental microbiology · May 2016
Gut bacterial communities play essential roles in host biology, but to date we lack information on the forces that shape gut microbiota between hosts and over time in natural populations. Understanding these forces in wild primates provides a valuable comp ...
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Journal ArticleNat Commun · April 19, 2016
In humans and other animals, harsh circumstances in early life predict morbidity and mortality in adulthood. Multiple adverse conditions are thought to be especially toxic, but this hypothesis has rarely been tested in a prospective, longitudinal framework ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · April 2016
Variation in resource availability commonly exerts strong effects on fitness-related traits in wild animals. However, we know little about the molecular mechanisms that mediate these effects, or about their persistence over time. To address these questions ...
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Journal ArticleScientific data · March 2016
We provide male and female census count data, age-specific survivorship, and female age-specific fertility estimates for populations of seven wild primates that have been continuously monitored for at least 29 years: sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi) in Madag ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology · January 1, 2016
Many animals seek refuge when they sleep, often employing different sleeping sites in successive time periods. Switching from one sleeping site to another might reduce predation or parasite exposure or increase proximity to food resources that are temporal ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · December 2015
Group size is an important trait of social animals, affecting how individuals allocate time and use space, and influencing both an individual's fitness and the collective, cooperative behaviors of the group as a whole. Here we tested predictions motivated ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral ecology and sociobiology · December 2015
Social network analysis is increasingly applied to understand the evolution of animal sociality. Identifying ecological and evolutionary drivers of complex social structures requires inferring how social networks change over time. In most observational stu ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · September 2015
Linear dominance hierarchies, which are common in social animals, can profoundly influence access to limited resources, reproductive opportunities and health. In spite of their importance, the mechanisms that govern the dynamics of such hierarchies remain ...
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Journal ArticleThe American naturalist · June 2015
Early-life experiences can dramatically affect adult traits. However, the evolutionary origins of such early-life effects are debated. The predictive adaptive response hypothesis argues that adverse early environments prompt adaptive phenotypic adjustments ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal behaviour · June 2015
The paradigm of competitive males vying to influence female mate choice has been repeatedly upheld, but, increasingly, studies also report competitive females and choosy males. One female trait that is commonly proposed to influence male mate choice is the ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · March 2015
Social relationships have profound effects on health in humans and other primates, but the mechanisms that explain this relationship are not well understood. Using shotgun metagenomic data from wild baboons, we found that social group membership and social ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · February 2015
Primate evolution has been argued to result, in part, from changes in how genes are regulated. However, we still know little about gene regulation in natural primate populations. We conducted an RNA sequencing (RNA-seq)-based study of baboons from an inten ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent zoology · January 2015
Social network structures can crucially impact complex social processes such as collective behaviour or the transmission of information and diseases. However, currently it is poorly understood how social networks change over time. Previous studies on prima ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2015
Canines represent an essential component of the dentition for any heterodont mammal. In primates, like many other mammals, canines are frequently used as weapons. Hence, tooth size and wear may have significant implications for fighting ability, and conseq ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · December 2014
Multilevel societies with fission-fusion dynamics--arguably the most complex animal societies--are defined by two or more nested levels of organization. The core of these societies are modular social units that regularly fission and fuse with one another. ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · October 2014
Social integration and support can have profound effects on human survival. The extent of this phenomenon in non-human animals is largely unknown, but such knowledge is important to understanding the evolution of both lifespan and sociality. Here, we repor ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2014
Male relationships in most species of mammals generally are characterized by intense intrasexual competition, with little bonding among unrelated individuals. In contrast, human societies are characterized by high levels of cooperation and strong bonds amo ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology · September 16, 2014
Factors affecting social group size in mammals are relatively well studied for females, but less is known about determinants of group size for males, particularly in species that live in sexually segregated groups. Male grouping patterns are thought to be ...
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Journal ArticleGeneral and comparative endocrinology · August 2014
The development of non-invasive methods, particularly fecal determination, has made possible the assessment of hormone concentrations in wild animal populations. However, measuring fecal metabolites needs careful validation for each species and for each se ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal behaviour · August 2014
Many mammalian societies are structured by dominance hierarchies, and an individual's position within this hierarchy can influence reproduction, behaviour, physiology and health. In nepotistic hierarchies, which are common in cercopithecine primates and al ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral ecology and sociobiology · July 2014
Signals of fertility in female animals are of increasing interest to evolutionary biologists, a development that coincides with increasing interest in male mate choice and the potential for female traits to evolve under sexual selection. We characterized v ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral ecology and sociobiology · July 2014
Reproduction is a notoriously costly phase of life, exposing individuals to injury, infectious disease, and energetic tradeoffs. The strength of these costs should be influenced by life history strategies, and in long-lived species, females may be selected ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2013
Women rarely give birth after ∼45 y of age, and they experience the cessation of reproductive cycles, menopause, at ∼50 y of age after a fertility decline lasting almost two decades. Such reproductive senescence in mid-lifespan is an evolutionary puzzle of ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · May 2013
Variation in the social environment can have profound effects on survival and reproduction in wild social mammals. However, we know little about the degree to which these effects are influenced by genetic differences among individuals, and conversely, the ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · March 2013
Testosterone (T) is often positively associated with male sexual behavior and negatively associated with paternal care. These associations have primarily been demonstrated in species where investment in paternal care begins well after mating activity is co ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · September 2012
By living in social groups with potential competitors, animals forgo monopolizing access to resources. Consequently, debate continues over how selection might favour sociality among competitors. For example, several models exist to account for the evolutio ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal behaviour · August 2012
In many social species, competition between groups is a major factor proximately affecting group-level movement patterns and space use and ultimately shaping the evolution of group living and complex sociality. Here we evaluated the factors influencing gro ...
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Chapter · July 1, 2012
In 1963, Jeanne and Stuart Altmann traveled through Kenya and Tanzania searching for a baboon study site. They settled on the Maasai-Amboseli Game Reserve (later Amboseli National Park) and conducted a 13-month study that laid the groundwork for much futur ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology · July 2012
The exaggerated sexual swellings exhibited by females of some primate species have been of interest to evolutionary biologists since the time of Darwin. We summarize existing hypotheses for their function and evolution and categorize these hypotheses withi ...
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Journal ArticleThe American naturalist · July 2012
Mating behavior has profound consequences for two phenomena--individual reproductive success and the maintenance of species boundaries--that contribute to evolutionary processes. Studies of mating behavior in relation to individual reproductive success are ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal behaviour · June 2012
In a wide range of taxa, including baboons, close social bonds seem to help animals cope with stress and enhance long-term reproductive success and longevity. Current evidence suggests that female baboons may benefit from establishing and maintaining highl ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · June 2012
Social status can have striking effects on health in humans and other animals, but the causes often are unknown. In male vertebrates, status-related differences in health may be influenced by correlates of male social status that suppress immune responses. ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · April 1, 2012
In mammals, maternal care is essential for offspring survival, yet individual differences in this care can dramatically affect offspring growth and development. Few studies have, however, investigated the sources, magnitude and consequences of naturally oc ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · February 2012
Behaviour and genetic structure are intimately related: mating patterns and patterns of movement between groups or populations influence the movement of genetic variation across the landscape and from one generation to the next. In hybrid zones, the behavi ...
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Journal ArticleGenome biology and evolution · January 2012
Changes in gene expression during development play an important role in shaping morphological and behavioral differences, including between humans and nonhuman primates. Although many of the most striking developmental changes occur during early developmen ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2012
Factors that influence learning and the spread of behavior in wild animal populations are important for understanding species responses to changing environments and for species conservation. In populations of wildlife species that come into conflict with h ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2012
It has been known for decades that wild baboons are naturally infected with Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes the diseases syphilis (subsp. pallidum), yaws (subsp. pertenue), and bejel (subsp. endemicum) in humans. Recently, a form of T. pallid ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · November 2011
In immature wild savannah baboons (Papio cynocephalus), we observed symptoms consistent with copper (Cu) deficiency and, more specifically, with a disorder referred to as white monkey syndrome (WMS) in laboratory primates. The objectives of this study were ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · July 2011
In social hierarchies, dominant individuals experience reproductive and health benefits, but the costs of social dominance remain a topic of debate. Prevailing hypotheses predict that higher-ranking males experience higher testosterone and glucocorticoid ( ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Applied Ecology · June 1, 2011
1. Conflict between humans and animals, generated by behaviours like crop raiding, can represent a major threat to the survival and conservation of protected species. Crop raiding is an example where the conflict is assumed to be attributable to a small nu ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · March 2011
Human senescence patterns-late onset of mortality increase, slow mortality acceleration, and exceptional longevity-are often described as unique in the animal world. Using an individual-based data set from longitudinal studies of wild populations of seven ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of physical anthropology · February 2011
In conditions characterized by energetic constraints, such as in periods of low food availability, some trade-offs between reproduction and self-maintenance may be necessary; even year-round breeders may then be forced to exhibit some reproductive seasonal ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · February 2011
Natural populations hold enormous potential for evolutionary genetic studies, especially when phenotypic, genetic and environmental data are all available on the same individuals. However, untangling the genotype-phenotype relationship in natural populatio ...
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Journal ArticleThe American naturalist · January 2011
In a stochastic environment, long-term fitness can be influenced by variation, covariation, and serial correlation in vital rates (survival and fertility). Yet no study of an animal population has parsed the contributions of these three aspects of variabil ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2011
Strong social bonds are uncommon among male mammals. In many mammals, however, males form all-male groups, providing opportunities for male-male bonds to emerge. We examined association patterns of male African elephants, Loxodonta africana, in all-male gr ...
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Journal ArticleAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences · August 2010
The pace of reproductive aging has been of considerable interest, especially in regard to the long postreproductive period in modern women. Here we use data for both sexes from a 37-year longitudinal study of a wild baboon population to place reproductive ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in genetics : TIG · August 2010
Ecological and evolutionary studies of wild primates hold important keys to understanding both the shared characteristics of primate biology and the genetic and phenotypic differences that make specific lineages, including our own, unique. Although complem ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent biology : CB · August 2010
Close, stable social bonds enhance longevity in wild baboons, providing clues about the importance of social bonds in our own evolutionary history. ...
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Journal ArticleMethods in ecology and evolution · June 2010
The importance of data archiving, data sharing, and public access to data has received considerable attention. Awareness is growing among scientists that collaborative databases can facilitate these activities.We provide a detailed description of the colla ...
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Chapter · April 1, 2010
This chapter surveys connections between the nervous system and the immune system, and suggests that their connections mediate many significant health outcomes. The nervous and immune systems are intimately connected by shared developmental, functional and ...
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Journal ArticleImmunogenetics · February 2010
Genes of the vertebrate major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are crucial to defense against infectious disease, provide an important measure of functional genetic diversity, and have been implicated in mate choice and kin recognition. As a result, MHC lo ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · October 2009
Despite significant advances in our knowledge of how testosterone mediates life-history trade-offs, this research has primarily focused on seasonal taxa. We know comparatively little about the relationship between testosterone and life-history stages for n ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral ecology and sociobiology · July 2009
Close associations between adult males and lactating females and their dependent infants are not commonly described in non-monogamous mammals. However, such associations [sometimes called "friendships" (Smuts 1985)] are regularly observed in several primat ...
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Journal ArticleNature · July 2009
The ecology, behaviour and genetics of our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates, should help us to understand the evolution of our own lineage. Although a large amount of data has been amassed on primate ecology and behaviour, much less is known ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · August 2008
Dominance status and reproductive experience are maternal characteristics that affect offspring traits in diverse taxa, including some cercopithecine primates. Maternal effects of this sort are widespread and are sources of variability in offspring fitness ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · August 2008
Environmental stressors impact physiology and behavior in many species of animals. These effects are partly mediated through changing concentrations of glucocorticoids, which also vary with reproductive state and social conditions. Prior research has focus ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · June 2008
Nonrandom patterns of mating and dispersal create fine-scale genetic structure in natural populations - especially of social mammals - with important evolutionary and conservation genetic consequences. Such structure is well-characterized for typical mamma ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · May 1, 2008
Maternal care is the most significant measure of successful adaptation among female mammals. Understanding the predictors of individual differences in offspring care is a major objective of mammalian reproductive biology. Recent studies suggest that differ ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · April 2008
The process and consequences of hybridization are of interest to evolutionary biologists because of the importance of hybridization in understanding reproductive isolation, speciation, and the influence of introgression on population genetic structure. Rec ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · April 2008
The timing of early life-history events, such as sexual maturation and first reproduction, can greatly influence variation in individual fitness. In this study, we analysed possible sources of variation underlying different measures of age at social and ph ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · February 2008
When females mate with multiple males, paternal care is generally expected to be negligible, because it may be difficult or impossible for males to discriminate their own offspring from those of other males, and because engaging in paternal care may reduce ...
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Journal ArticleDemocratization · 2008
This article argues that constitutionalism and democratic institutionalization are linked, and that variations in progress towards institutionalized democracy are explained by incentives for political actors to comply with constitutional constraints on the ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · December 2007
Offspring born to related parents may show reduced fitness due to inbreeding depression. Although evidence of inbreeding depression has accumulated for a variety of taxa during the past two decades, such analyses remain rare for primate species, probably b ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · October 2007
The costs of inbreeding depression, as well as the opportunity costs of inbreeding avoidance, determine whether and which mechanisms of inbreeding avoidance evolve. In African elephants, sex-biased dispersal does not lead to the complete separation of male ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · October 1, 2007
Group living provides benefits to individuals while imposing costs on them. In species that live in permanent social groups, group division provides the only opportunity for nondispersing individuals to change their group membership and improve their benef ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of physical anthropology · September 2007
Like humans, savannah baboons (Papio sp.) show heritable interindividual variation in complex physiological phenotypes. One prominent example of such variation involves production of the homeostatic regulator protein angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE), wh ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · August 1, 2007
Male African elephants experience intense intrasexual selection in gaining access to oestrous females, who represent a very scarce and highly mobile resource. An unusual combination of behavioural and physiological traits in males probably reflects this in ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · January 2007
Male mate-guarding episodes ('consortships'), are taxonomically widespread, yet costly to individual males. Consequently, males should bias consortships toward females with whom the probability of conception is high. We combined data on consortships with v ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · December 1, 2006
A growing body of evidence suggests that social bonds have adaptive value for animals that live in social groups. Although these findings suggest that natural selection may favor the ability to cultivate and sustain social bonds, we know very little about ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · December 1, 2006
Sociality has positive effects on female fitness in many mammalian species. Among female baboons, those who are most socially integrated reproduce most successfully. Here we test a number of predictions derived from kin selection theory about the strength ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · November 1, 2006
In mammals, high dominance rank among males is often associated with mating success. However, mating opportunities do not automatically translate into offspring production; observed mating success may be discordant with offspring production, for three reas ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2006
Precise regulation of MHC gene expression is critical to vertebrate immune surveillance and response. Polymorphisms in the 5' proximal promoter region of the human class II gene HLA-DQA1 have been shown to influence its transcriptional regulation and may c ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology · September 1, 2006
Environmental conditions are a key factor mediating reproductive success or failure. Consequently, many mammalian taxa have breeding seasons that coordinate critical reproductive stages with optimal environmental conditions. However, in contrast with most ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · May 2006
An impressive body of research has focused on the mechanisms by which the steroid estrogens (E), progestins (P), and glucocorticoids (GC) ensure successful pregnancy. With the advance of non-invasive techniques to measure steroids in urine and feces, stero ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · March 2006
Many social animals live in stable groups. In contrast, African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) live in unusually fluid, fission-fusion societies. That is, 'core' social groups are composed of predictable sets of individuals; however, over the cour ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2006
Socioecological models of the evolution of female-bonded societies predict a relation between resource distribution and the nature of female affiliative and dominance relationships. Species that mainly rely on abundant, widely distributed resources, like A ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular Ecology Notes · September 1, 2005
In spite of more than a decade of research on noninvasive genetic sampling, the low quality and quantity of DNA in noninvasive studies continue to plague researchers. Effects of locus size on error have been documented but are still poorly understood. Furt ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Zoology · May 1, 2005
The availability of a population of mostly known-age African elephants Loxodonta africana from Amboseli National Park, Kenya, provided a unique opportunity to assess the use of dung bolus diameter for estimating age. A predictive equation for estimating du ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · March 1, 2005
Growth rate is a life-history trait often linked to various fitness components, including survival, age of first reproduction, and fecundity. Here we present an analysis of growth-rate variability in a wild population of savannah baboons (Papio cynocephalu ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · September 2004
Steroid concentrations during late pregnancy and early lactation may be affected by both a female's reproductive history and her current condition, and may in turn predict subsequent life-history events, such as offspring survival. This study investigated ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2004
Coalitionary support in agonistic interactions is generally thought to be costly to the actor and beneficial to the recipient. Explanations for such cooperative interactions usually invoke kin selection, reciprocal altruism or mutualism. We evaluated the r ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · November 2003
Among nonhuman primates, females often form strong bonds with kin and other group members. These relationships are thought to have adaptive value for females, but direct effects of sociality on fitness have never been demonstrated. We present 16 years of b ...
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Journal ArticleNature · September 2003
Although male parental care is rare among mammals, adult males of many cercopithecine primate species provide care for infants and juveniles. This care is often in the form of grooming, carrying, support in agonistic interactions, and protection against in ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular Ecology Notes · June 1, 2003
Most African elephant (Loxodonta africana africana) populations are isolated and thus threatened by a loss of genetic diversity. As a consequence, genetic analysis of African elephant populations will play an increasing role in their conservation, and micr ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · May 2003
Nonhuman primates, like humans, mature slowly and have low fertility during a relatively long life. As data have accumulated on life-history patterns of nonhuman primates, comparative studies have yielded important insights into the evolution of this slow ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Primatology · April 1, 2003
We screened fecal samples from 3 groups of wild-living baboons (Papio cynocephalus and P. anubis), involved in longitudinal behavioral studies, for evidence of gastrointestinal parasites. The two objectives of the study were: 1) to compare parasites from t ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · April 1, 2003
In many animals, variance in male mating success is strongly correlated with male dominance rank or some other measure of fighting ability. Studies in primates, however, have varied greatly in whether they detect a relationship between male dominance rank ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · March 2003
Adult female cercopithecines have long been known to bias their social behaviour towards close maternal kin. However, much less is understood about the behaviour of paternal kin, especially in wild populations. Here, we show that wild adult female baboons ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · November 2002
The purpose of this study was to test for evidence that savannah baboons (Papio cynocephalus) underwent a population expansion in concert with a hypothesized expansion of African human and chimpanzee populations during the late Pleistocene. The rationale i ...
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Journal ArticleAfrican Journal of Ecology · September 1, 2002
The Amboseli basin, a semi-arid, open savannah area of southern Kenya, has experienced extensive changes in habitat since the early 1960's. The present report documents patterns of air temperature and rainfall in Amboseli for the 25-year period beginning 1 ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · July 2002
Why do closely related primate genera vary in longevity, and what does this teach us about human aging? Life tables of female baboons (Papio hamadryas) in two wild populations of East Africa and in a large captive population in San Antonio, Texas, provide ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution · April 2002
A comprehensive assessment of the determinants of effective population size (N(e)) requires estimates of variance in lifetime reproductive success and past changes in census numbers. For natural populations, such information can be best obtained by combini ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · January 2002
In a wide variety of animal species, females produce vocalizations just before, during, or immediately after copulation. Observational and experimental evidence indicates that these copulation calls are sexually selected traits, functioning to promote comp ...
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Journal ArticleThe Journal of heredity · November 2001
Here we report an assessment of the determinants of effective population size (N(e)) in species with overlapping generations. Specifically, we used a stochastic demographic model to investigate the influence of different life-history variables on N(e)/N (w ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · April 2001
In 1986, Samuels and Altmann reported evidence for a hybrid zone between Papio anubis and Papio cynocephalus in Amboseli, Kenya, in a baboon population that has been the subject of long-term study since 1971 [Samuels & Altmann, International Journal of Pri ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · August 2000
Twenty-nine human microsatellite primer pairs were screened for their utility in the cross-species amplification of baboon DNA derived from both blood and feces as part of a larger study to identify paternal half sisters in a population of wild baboons (Pa ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · July 1999
Mammals commonly avoid mating with maternal kin, probably as a result of selection for inbreeding avoidance. Mating with paternal kin should be selected against for the same reason. However, identifying paternal kin may be more difficult than identifying m ...
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Journal ArticleArchives of general psychiatry · December 1997
BackgroundThe phenomena of basal hypercortisolism and of dexamethasone resistance have long intrigued biological psychiatrists, and much is still unknown as to the causes and consequences of such adrenocortical hyperactivity in various neuropsychi ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · June 1996
The predictability of genetic structure from social structure and differential mating success was tested in wild baboons. Baboon populations are subdivided into cohesive social groups that include multiple adults of both sexes. As in many mammals, males ar ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 1996
For many species, mate guarding results in dramatic departures from normal behaviour that reflect compromised attention to feeding and other activities. Such departures have previously been difficult to document in primates, however. Data were gathered on ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · June 1, 1995
Age at maturity is a particularly important life history trait, but maturational data are rare for males in natural populations of mammals. Here we provide information on three maturational milestones and their social and demographic correlates among 43 wi ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 1994
Glance rates, a measure of vigilance, were sampled in infant and young juvenile yellow baboons, Papio cynocephalus, in Amboseli, Kenya, to test ecological and social predictions about the ontogeny of vigilance. Glance rates of young baboons did not vary be ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology · January 1, 1993
The extraordinary genetic polymorphism observed in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) of the vertebrate genome has attracted the attention of researchers for decades. In almost all taxa that have been investigated, levels of polymorphism are remark ...
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Journal ArticleHormones and behavior · June 1992
A very aggressive young adult male entered one of three long-term study groups of yellow baboons. Papio cynocephalus, approximately 3 weeks after an immobilization project began. The immigrant male's rate of agonistic encounters was appreciably higher than ...
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Journal ArticleOecologia · April 1, 1987
We obtined data on body mass and growth rates for the immature members of two groups of wild baboons in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Data were collected without feeding, trapping, or handling. The data were separated into cross-sectional and longitudinal ...
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