Intergenerational effects of early adversity on survival in wild baboons.

ABSTRACT: 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. We fill this gap by leveraging prospective, longitudinal data on a wild, long-lived primate. We find that juveniles whose mothers experienced early life adversity exhibit high mortality before age 4, independent of the juvenile's own experience of early adversity. These juveniles often preceded their mothers in death by 1 to 2 years, indicating that high adversity females decline in their ability to raise offspring near the end of life. While we cannot exclude direct effects of a parent's environment on offspring quality (e.g., inherited e

SUBMITTER: Zipple MN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6759315 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature