Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States
Elizabeth A Archie
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, United States; Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya
Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States; Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya; Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, United States; Duke Population Research Institute, Duke University, Durham, United States
Jeanne Altmann
Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, United States
Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States; Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya; Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, United States; Duke Population Research Institute, Duke University, Durham, United States
Early life adversity can affect an individual’s health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual’s offspring is not well understood. We fill this gap by leveraging prospective, longitudinal data on a wild, long-lived primate. We find that juveniles whose mothers experienced early life adversity exhibit high mortality before age 4, independent of the juvenile’s own experience of early adversity. These juveniles often preceded their mothers in death by 1 to 2 years, indicating that high adversity females decline in their ability to raise offspring near the end of life. While we cannot exclude direct effects of a parent’s environment on offspring quality (e.g., inherited epigenetic changes), our results are completely consistent with a classic parental effect, in which the environment experienced by a parent affects its future phenotype and therefore its offspring’s phenotype.
