ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2025
Testing early life effects frameworks: developmental constraints and adaptive response hypotheses do not explain fertility outcomes in wild female baboons.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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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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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cumulative Early-Life Adversities Predict Short- and Long-Term Survival in aEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Short- and long-term costs of reproduction revealed by telomere dynamics in wild greater horseshoe bats.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
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6 authors.
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Abstract
In evolutionary ecology, two classes of explanations are frequently invoked to explain early life effects on adult outcomes. Developmental constraints (DC) explanations contend that the costs of early adversity arise from limitations adversity places on optimal development. Adaptive response (AR) hypotheses propose that later life outcomes will be worse when early and adult environments are poorly 'matched'. Here, we use recently proposed mathematical definitions for these hypotheses and a quadratic-regression based approach to test the long-term consequences of variation in developmental environments on fertility in wild baboons. We evaluate whether low rainfall and/or dominance rank during development predict three female fertility measures in adulthood, and whether any observed relationships are consistent with DC and/or AR. Neither rainfall during development nor the difference between rainfall in development and adulthood predicted any fertility measures. Females who were low-ranking during development had an elevated risk of losing infants later in life, and greater change in rank between development and adulthood predicted greater risk of infant loss. However, both effects were statistically marginal and consistent with alternative explanations, including adult environmental quality effects. Consequently, our data do not provide compelling support for either of these common explanations for the evolution of early life effects.
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