Early maternal loss leads to short- but not long-term effects on diurnal cortisol slopes in wild chimpanzees.

ABSTRACT: The biological embedding model (BEM) suggests that fitness costs of maternal loss arise when early-life experience embeds long-term alterations to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity. Alternatively, the adaptive calibration model (ACM) regards physiological changes during ontogeny as short-term adaptations. Both models have been tested in humans but rarely in wild, long-lived animals. We assessed whether, as in humans, maternal loss had short- and long-term impacts on orphan wild chimpanzee urinary cortisol levels and diurnal urinary cortisol slopes, both indicative of HPA axis functioning. Immature chimpanzees recently orphaned and/or orphaned early in life had diurnal cortisol slopes reflecting heightened activation of the HPA axis. However, these effects appeared short-te

SUBMITTER: Girard-Buttoz C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8208813 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature