ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Sons accelerate maternal aging in a wild mammal.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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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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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.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Costs of maternal care revealed through body conditionin Northern Resident killer whales (Orcinus orca).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Sons and parental cognition in mid-life and older adulthood.Journal of psychiatric research · 2022Article
- Understanding Reproductive Aging in Wildlife to Improve Animal Conservation and Human Reproductive Health.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
- Late-life costs of raising sons in bighorn sheep.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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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
Aging, or senescence, is a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age. It leads to age-related declines in reproduction (reproductive senescence) and survival (actuarial senescence) in most organisms. However, senescence patterns can be highly variable across species, populations, and individuals, and the reasons for such variations remain poorly understood. Evolutionary theories predict that increases in reproductive effort in early life should be associated with accelerated senescence, but empirical tests have yielded mixed results. Although in sexually size-dimorphic species offspring of the larger sex (typically males) commonly require more parental resources, these sex differences are not currently incorporated into evolutionary theories of aging. Here, we show that female reproductive senescence varies with both the number and sex ratio of offspring weaned during early life, using data from a long-term study of bighorn sheep. For a given number of offspring, females that weaned more sons than daughters when aged between 2 and 7 y experienced faster senescence in offspring survival in old age. By contrast, analyses of actuarial senescence showed no cost of early-life reproduction. Our results unite two important topics in evolutionary biology: life history and sex allocation. Offspring sex ratio may help explain among-individual variation in senescence rates in other species, including humans.
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Registered trials
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