ArticleBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
Short-term and delayed effects of mother death on calf mortality in Asian elephants.
Article in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Testing early life effects frameworks: developmental constraints and adaptive response hypotheses do not explain fertility outcomes in wild female baboons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Early-life paternal relationships predict adult female survival in wild baboons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Early-life paternal relationships predict adult female survival in wild baboons.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Social tolerance and role model diversity increase tool use learning opportunities across chimpanzee ontogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Early life adversity has sex-dependent effects on survival across the lifespan in rhesus macaques.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Milk metabolite composition of a semi-captive population of Asian elephants.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Maternal care leads to the evolution of long, slow lives.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Differences in Mother-Infant Bond and Social Behavior of African Elephant Calves Living In Situ and Ex Situ.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Early life adversities and lifelong health outcomes: A review of the literature on large, social, long-lived nonhuman mammals.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Maternal death and offspring fitness in multiple wild primates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Milk Composition of Asian Elephants (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Can postfertile life stages evolve as an anticancer mechanism?PLoS biology · 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
- Males have more aggressive and less sociable personalities than females in semi-captive Asian elephants.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Parasite-associated mortality in a long-lived mammal: Variation with host age, sex, and reproduction.Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
- Orphaned female elephant social bonds reflect lack of access to mature adults.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Nearby grandmother enhances calf survival and reproduction in Asian elephants.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- The reproductive advantages of a long life: longevity and senescence in wild female African elephants.Behavioral ecology and sociobiologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Long-lived, highly social species with prolonged offspring dependency can show long postreproductive periods. The Mother hypothesis proposes that a need for extended maternal care of offspring together with increased maternal mortality risk associated with old age select for such postreproductive survival, but tests in species with long postreproductive periods, other than humans and marine mammals, are lacking. Here, we investigate the Mother hypothesis with longitudinal data on Asian elephants from timber camps of Myanmar 1) to determine the costs of reproduction on female age-specific mortality risk within 1 year after calving and 2) to quantify the effects of mother loss on calf survival across development. We found that older females did not show an increased immediate mortality risk after calving. Calves had a 10-fold higher mortality risk in their first year if they lost their mother, but this decreased with age to only a 1.1-fold higher risk in the fifth year. We also detected delayed effects of maternal death: calves losing their mother during early ages still suffered from increased mortality risk at ages 3-4 and during adolescence but such effects were weaker in magnitude. Consequently, the Mother hypothesis could account for the first 5 years of postreproductive survival, but there were no costs of continued reproduction on the immediate maternal mortality risk. However, the observed postreproductive lifespan of females surviving to old age commonly exceeds 5 years in Asian elephants, and further studies are thus needed to determine selection for (postreproductive) lifespan in elephants and other comparably long-lived species.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.