Offspring Hormones Reflect the Maternal Prenatal Social Environment: Potential for Foetal Programming?

ABSTRACT: Females of many species adaptively program their offspring to predictable environmental conditions, a process that is often mediated by hormones. Laboratory studies have shown, for instance, that social density affects levels of maternal cortisol and testosterone, leading to fitness-relevant changes in offspring physiology and behaviour. However, the effects of social density remain poorly understood in natural populations due to the difficulty of disentangling confounding influences such as climatic variation and food availability. Colonially breeding marine mammals offer a unique opportunity to study maternal effects in response to variable colony densities under similar ecological conditions. We therefore quantified maternal and offspring hormone levels in 84 Antarctic fur seals (Arctoc

SUBMITTER: Meise K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4711963 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature