ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
Prenatal stress effects in a wild, long-lived primate: predictive adaptive responses in an unpredictable environment.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 80 citations in OpenAlex.
- Maternal Prenatal Stress and the Offspring Gut Microbiome: A Cross-Species Systematic Review.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Pooled it
- Prenatal stress accelerates offspring growth to compensate for reduced maternal investment across mammals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Pooled it
- Cumulative Early-Life Adversities Predict Short- and Long-Term Survival in aEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Fluctuating salinity during development impacts fish life histories.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Assessing Gestation and Fetal Sex in Wild Assamese Macaques Using Urinary Estrogen Analysis.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Testing early life effects frameworks: developmental constraints and adaptive response hypotheses do not explain fertility outcomes in wild female baboons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Maternal Capital Hypothesis: Giving Mothers Central Place in Evolutionary Perspectives on Developmental Plasticity and Health.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Review
- Early prenatal but not postnatal glucocorticoid exposure is associated with enhanced HPA axis activity into adulthood in a wild primate.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Early life drought predicts components of adult body size in wild female baboons.American journal of biological anthropology · 2023Article
- Natural Animal Populations as Model Systems for Understanding Early Life Adversity Effects on Aging.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Conceptual and analytical approaches for modelling the developmental origins of inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Mechanisms of equality and inequality in mammalian societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The long-term gut bacterial signature of a wild primate is associated with a timing effect of pre- and postnatal maternal glucocorticoid levels.Microbiome · 2023Article
- Minimally invasive biomarkers in human and non-human primate evolutionary biology: Tools for understanding variation and adaptation.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Article
- Article
- Accelerated reproduction is not an adaptive response to early-life adversity in wild baboons.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- The developmental support hypothesis: adaptive plasticity in neural development in response to cues of social support.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Social determinants of health and survival in humans and other animals.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2020Review
- Modeling the evolution of sensitive periods.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Review
- Maternal glucocorticoids promote offspring growth without inducing oxidative stress or shortening telomeres in wild red squirrels.The Journal of experimental biology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prenatal maternal stress affects offspring phenotype in numerous species including humans, but it is debated whether these effects are evolutionarily adaptive. Relating stress to adverse conditions, current explanations invoke either short-term developmental constraints on offspring phenotype resulting in decelerated growth to avoid starvation, or long-term predictive adaptive responses (PARs) resulting in accelerated growth and reproduction in response to reduced life expectancies. Two PAR subtypes were proposed, acting either on predicted internal somatic states or predicted external environmental conditions, but because both affect phenotypes similarly, they are largely indistinguishable. Only external (not internal) PARs rely on high environmental stability particularly in long-lived species. We report on a crucial test case in a wild long-lived mammal, the Assamese macaque (Macaca assamensis), which evolved and lives in an unpredictable environment where external PARs are probably not advantageous. We quantified food availability, growth, motor skills, maternal caretaking style and maternal physiological stress from faecal glucocorticoid measures. Prenatal maternal stress was negatively correlated to prenatal food availability and led to accelerated offspring growth accompanied by decelerated motor skill acquisition and reduced immune function. These results support the 'internal PAR' theory, which stresses the role of stable adverse internal somatic states rather than stable external environments.
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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.