ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Primate energy expenditure and life history.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 163 citations in OpenAlex.
- Primate energy input and the evolutionary transition to energy-dense diets in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Pooled it
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- The "fire of life cycles": age-specific metabolic scaling within and among species.Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · 2026Review
- Reliable long-term individual variation in wild chimpanzee technological efficiency.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Metabolic scaling, energy allocation tradeoffs, and the evolution of humans' unique metabolism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Olduvai domain expression downregulates mitochondrial pathways: implications for human brain evolution and neoteny.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Thermal and morphometric correlates of the extremely low rate of energy use in a wild frugivorous primate, the Mayotte lemur.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Mantled howler monkey males assess their rivals through formant spacing of long-distance calls.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Astrocytes Drive Divergent Metabolic Gene Expression in Humans and Chimpanzees.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Towards an integrated understanding of dietary phenotypes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Early life drought predicts components of adult body size in wild female baboons.American journal of biological anthropology · 2023Article
- The provisioned primate: patterns of obesity across lemurs, monkeys, apes and humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The Relevance of Time in Biological Scaling.Biology · 2023Review
- Bonobo mothers have elevated urinary cortisol levels during early but not mid or late lactation.Primates; journal of primatology · 2023Article
- Characterization of sinoatrial automaticity in Microcebus murinus to study the effect of aging on cardiac activity and the correlation with longevity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Energy budgets of captive Chinese pangolins (Conservation physiology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors at 12 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans and other primates are distinct among placental mammals in having exceptionally slow rates of growth, reproduction, and aging. Primates' slow life history schedules are generally thought to reflect an evolved strategy of allocating energy away from growth and reproduction and toward somatic investment, particularly to the development and maintenance of large brains. Here we examine an alternative explanation: that primates' slow life histories reflect low total energy expenditure (TEE) (kilocalories per day) relative to other placental mammals. We compared doubly labeled water measurements of TEE among 17 primate species with similar measures for other placental mammals. We found that primates use remarkably little energy each day, expending on average only 50% of the energy expected for a placental mammal of similar mass. Such large differences in TEE are not easily explained by differences in physical activity, and instead appear to reflect systemic metabolic adaptation for low energy expenditures in primates. Indeed, comparisons of wild and captive primate populations indicate similar levels of energy expenditure. Broad interspecific comparisons of growth, reproduction, and maximum life span indicate that primates' slow metabolic rates contribute to their characteristically slow life histories.
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