ArticleeLife2021
Early maternal loss leads to short- but not long-term effects on diurnal cortisol slopes in wild chimpanzees.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Social tolerance and role model diversity increase tool use learning opportunities across chimpanzee ontogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Article
- 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 adversities and lifelong health outcomes: A review of the literature on large, social, long-lived nonhuman mammals.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Social and early life determinants of survival from cradle to grave: A case study in wild baboons.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Cumulative early-life adversity does not predict reduced adult longevity in wild gorillas.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Shared community effects and the non-genetic maternal environment shape cortisol levels in wild chimpanzees.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Early Trauma Leaves No Social Signature in Sanctuary-Housed Chimpanzees (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Puberty initiates a unique stage of social learning and development prior to adulthood: Insights from studies of adolescence in wild chimpanzees.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Article
- Thermal imaging reveals social monitoring during social feeding in wild chimpanzees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Dead-infant carrying by chimpanzee mothers in the Budongo Forest.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Social support correlates with glucocorticoid concentrations in wild African elephant orphans.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Orphaning stunts growth in wild African elephants.Conservation physiology · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 5 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The biological embedding model (BEM) suggests that fitness costs of maternal loss arise when early-life experience embeds long-term alterations to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity. Alternatively, the adaptive calibration model (ACM) regards physiological changes during ontogeny as short-term adaptations. Both models have been tested in humans but rarely in wild, long-lived animals. We assessed whether, as in humans, maternal loss had short- and long-term impacts on orphan wild chimpanzee urinary cortisol levels and diurnal urinary cortisol slopes, both indicative of HPA axis functioning. Immature chimpanzees recently orphaned and/or orphaned early in life had diurnal cortisol slopes reflecting heightened activation of the HPA axis. However, these effects appeared short-term, with no consistent differences between orphan and non-orphan cortisol profiles in mature males, suggesting stronger support for the ACM than the BEM in wild chimpanzees. Compensatory mechanisms, such as adoption, may buffer against certain physiological effects of maternal loss in this species.
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