ArticleScientific reports2016
Nearby grandmother enhances calf survival and reproduction in Asian elephants.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 90 citations in OpenAlex.
- 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
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- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Hematopoietic (stem) cells-The elixir of life?FEBS letters · 2026Review
- Gender and sex interactions are intrinsic components of cancer phenotypes.Nature reviews. Cancer · 2025Review
- Revised Age Estimates for Northern Resident Killer Whales (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Commentary on the Adaptive Significance of Sociality Around Parturition Events, and Conspecific Support of Parturient Females in Some Social Mammals.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Milk metabolite composition of a semi-captive population of Asian elephants.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Investment by maternal grandmother buffers children against the impacts of adverse early life experiences.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Inclusive fitness forces of selection in an age-structured population.Communications biology · 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
- Temporal dynamics of mother-offspring relationships in Bigg's killer whales: opportunities for kin-directed help by post-reproductive females.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Grandmother presence improved grandchild survival against childhood infections but not vaccination coverage in historical Finns.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Using ecotourism boats for estimating the abundance of a bottlenose dolphin population in south-eastern Australia.PloS one · 2023Article
- The importance of elders: Extending Hamilton's force of selection to include intergenerational transfers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Fighting force and experience combine to determine contest success in a warlike mammal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Investigating associations between nematode infection and three measures of sociality in Asian elephants.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2022Article
- Offspring fertility and grandchild survival enhanced by maternal grandmothers in a pre-industrial human society.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Demographic and reproductive associations with nematode infection in a long-lived mammal.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Usually animals reproduce into old age, but a few species such as humans and killer whales can live decades after their last reproduction. The grandmother hypothesis proposes that such life-history evolved through older females switching to invest in their existing (grand)offspring, thereby increasing their inclusive fitness and selection for post-reproductive lifespan. However, positive grandmother effects are also found in non-menopausal taxa, but evidence of their associated fitness effects is rare and only a few tests of the hypothesis in such species exist. Here we investigate the grandmother effects in Asian elephants. Using a multigenerational demographic dataset on semi-captive elephants in Myanmar, we found that grandcalves from young mothers (<20 years) had 8 times lower mortality risk if the grandmother resided with her grandcalf compared to grandmothers residing elsewhere. Resident grandmothers also decreased their daughters' inter-birth intervals by one year. In contrast to the hypothesis predictions, the grandmother's own reproductive status did not modify such grandmother benefits. That elephant grandmothers increased their inclusive fitness by enhancing their daughter's reproductive rate and success irrespective of their own reproductive status suggests that fitness-enhancing grandmaternal effects are widespread, and challenge the view that grandmother effects alone select for menopause coupled with long post-reproductive lifespan.
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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.