ArticleJournal of evolutionary biology2014
Early reproductive investment, senescence and lifetime reproductive success in female Asian elephants.
Article in Journal of evolutionary biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 79 citations in OpenAlex.
- Early-life stress reduces senescence in the field for an indeterminately growing ectotherm.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Does energy minimisation constrain behavioural plasticity? Long-term activity budgets of a model folivore-frugivore.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Epigenetic Signatures of Ageing in Asian Elephants Revealed by Reduced Representation Bisulphite Sequencing.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Evidence for Environment-Specific Pace-of-Life Syndromes.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- The Effect of Social Rank on Reproductive Traits Depends on Rank Metric: Evidence From a Group-Living Carnivore.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Rapid post-release adaptation of released orphan elephants from a rescue centre to a national park in Sri Lanka based on faecal glucocorticoid metabolite analyses.Conservation physiology · 2025Article
- Longitudinal evidence linking childhood energetics, maturation, skeletal muscle mass and adult human male sociosexuality.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Different proxies, different stories? Imperfect correlations and different determinants of fitness in bighorn sheep.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Investigating associations between nematode infection and three measures of sociality in Asian elephants.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2022Article
- Parental age at conception on mouse lemur's offspring longevity: Sex-specific maternal effects.PloS one · 2022Article
- Determinants and long-term costs of early reproduction in males of a long-lived polygynous mammal.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Nontraditional systems in aging research: an update.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2021Review
- Faecal parasites increase with age but not reproductive effort in wild female chimpanzees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Early predictors of female lifetime reproductive success in a solitary hibernator: evidence for "silver spoon" effect.Oecologia · 2020Article
- Commonalities in Management and Husbandry Factors Important for Health and Welfare of Captive Elephants in North America and Thailand.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Review
- Lifetime Fitness in Wild Female Baboons: Trade-Offs and Individual Heterogeneity in Quality.The American naturalist · 2019Article
- Mahout Perspectives on Asian Elephants and Their Living Conditions.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2019Article
- Capture from the wild has long-term costs on reproductive success in Asian elephants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Evolutionary significance of maternal kinship in a long-lived mammal.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolutionary theory of senescence posits that as the probability of extrinsic mortality increases with age, selection should favour early-life over late-life reproduction. Studies on natural vertebrate populations show early reproduction may impair later-life performance, but the consequences for lifetime fitness have rarely been determined, and little is known of whether similar patterns apply to mammals which typically live for several decades. We used a longitudinal dataset on Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to investigate associations between early-life reproduction and female age-specific survival, fecundity and offspring survival to independence, as well as lifetime breeding success (lifetime number of calves produced). Females showed low fecundity following sexual maturity, followed by a rapid increase to a peak at age 19 and a subsequent decline. High early life reproductive output (before the peak of performance) was positively associated with subsequent age-specific fecundity and offspring survival, but significantly impaired a female's own later-life survival. Despite the negative effects of early reproduction on late-life survival, early reproduction is under positive selection through a positive association with lifetime breeding success. Our results suggest a trade-off between early reproduction and later survival which is maintained by strong selection for high early fecundity, and thus support the prediction from life history theory that high investment in reproductive success in early life is favoured by selection through lifetime fitness despite costs to later-life survival. That maternal survival in elephants depends on previous reproductive investment also has implications for the success of (semi-)captive breeding programmes of this endangered species.
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