ArticleHormones and behavior2020
Higher dominance rank is associated with lower glucocorticoids in wild female baboons: A rank metric comparison.
Article in Hormones and behavior, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Testing early life effects frameworks: developmental constraints and adaptive response hypotheses do not explain fertility outcomes in wild female baboons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
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- And Baby Makes Three: Postpartum Changes in Male-Female Affiliative Interactions in White-Faced Capuchins.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Energetic costs of social dominance in wild male baboons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
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- Environmental, sex-specific and genetic determinants of infant social behaviour in a wild primate.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Social and early life determinants of survival from cradle to grave: A case study in wild baboons.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Re-wilding model organisms: Opportunities to test causal mechanisms in social determinants of health and aging.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Demographic turnover can be a leading driver of hierarchy dynamics, and social inheritance modifies its effects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A Causal Mediation Model for Longitudinal Mediators and Survival Outcomes with an Application to Animal Behavior.Journal of agricultural, biological, and environmental statistics · 2023Article
- Status does not predict stress among Hadza hunter-gatherer men.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Hormonal variation and temporal dynamics of musth in Asian elephants (Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary Approaches in Aging Research.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine · 2022Review
- Distinct gene regulatory signatures of dominance rank and social bond strength in wild baboons.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The benefits of being dominant: health correlates of male social rank and age in a marmot.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Better baboon break-ups: collective decision theory of complex social network fissions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- A comparison of dominance rank metrics reveals multiple competitive landscapes in an animal society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
In vertebrates, glucocorticoid secretion occurs in response to energetic and psychosocial stressors that trigger the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Measuring glucocorticoid concentrations can therefore shed light on the stressors associated with different social and environmental variables, including dominance rank. Using 14,172 fecal samples from 237 wild female baboons, we test the hypothesis that high-ranking females experience fewer psychosocial and/or energetic stressors than lower-ranking females. We predicted that high-ranking females would have lower fecal glucocorticoid (fGC) concentrations than low-ranking females. Because dominance rank can be measured in multiple ways, we employ an information theoretic approach to compare 5 different measures of rank as predictors of fGC concentrations: ordinal rank; proportional rank; Elo rating; and two approaches to categorical ranking (alpha vs non-alpha and high-middle-low). Our hypothesis was supported, but it was also too simplistic. We found that alpha females exhibited substantially lower fGCs than other females (typical reduction = 8.2%). If we used proportional rank instead of alpha versus non-alpha status in the model, we observed a weak effect of rank such that fGCs rose 4.2% from the highest- to lowest-ranking female in the hierarchy. Models using ordinal rank, Elo rating, or high-middle-low categories alone failed to explain variation in female fGCs. Our findings shed new light on the association between dominance rank and the stress response, the competitive landscape of female baboons as compared to males, and the assumptions inherent in a researcher's choice of rank metric.
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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.