Project Details
Projekt
Prenatal stress effects on sociality and health in wild Assamese macaques
Applicant
Privatdozent Dr. Oliver Schülke, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Sensory and Behavioural Biology
Term
from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 244372499
The developmental origins of health and disease is still debated. But it is well established that adverse conditions early in life can have long-lasting effects on immune function, systemic disease, neurodevelopment, skill acquisition and behavior in animals and humans. These effects may either be interpreted as resulting from constraints on an undisturbed development or as adaptive developmental plasticity allowing for adaptive responses to conditions predicted for later life phases. The internal predictive response hypothesis proposes that early adversity causally alters the state of the developing individual, that this state persists into later life phases, and that the later state determines later phenotype yielding fitness advantages over unchanged phenotypes or the phenotypes developing without the altered internal state. Thus, the internal PAR predicts early adversity to causally decrease life expectancy and the individual to accelerate life history pace to increase reproductive rate at a cost to maintenance functions and quality related attributes which would enhance longevity and offspring quality. Against the background of this hypothesis we aim at collecting data to investigate the effects of early adversity on later sociality outcomes that have rarely been studied in large groups in the wild. Our own previous work on wild Assamese macaques in their natural habitat has established that prenatal maternal physiological stress (PMPS) affects offspring growth, motoric skill acquisition and infection in the first 18 month of life. Here we propose using a largely cross-sectional design to assess at different life phases all the way into adulthood PMPS effects also on muscle mass, gastrointestinal parasite community richness, composition of the gut microbiota, baseline physiological stress, reactivity of the HPA axis, social integration, social bonds, survival, and reproduction. The study is prospective in the sense that fecal samples for assessment of physiological stress in mothers have been collected discontinuously since 2007 and outcome variables will be measured in this project. Longitudinal analyses involving the subjects of our previous study will allow to assess potential interactions between effects occurring at different sensitive phases in development. The project is tightly linked to other projects in the research group that assess the different roles of social integration versus social bonding, that address the sources and consequences of variation in physiological stress, and that describe covariates of variation in gut parasites and microbiota. The project s unique contribution to the general SoHaPi aim of improving the understanding of the sociality health fitness nexus is to providing a developmental perspective on adult health.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Subproject of
FOR 2136:
Sociality and Health in Primates
