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Costs of reproduction in a long-lived female primate: injury risk and wound healing

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Summary

Reproduction is a notoriously costly phase of life, exposing individuals to injury, infectious disease, and energetic trade-offs. The strength of these costs should be influenced by life history strategies, and in long-lived species, females may be selected to mitigate costs of reproduction because life span is such an important component of their reproductive success. Here, we report evidence for two costs of reproduction that may influence survival in wild female baboons—injury risk and delayed wound healing. Based on 29 years of observations in the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya, we found that wild female baboons experienced the highest risk of injury on days when they were most likely to be ovulating. In addition, lactating females healed from wounds more slowly than pregnant or cycling females, indicating a possible trade-off between lactation and immune function. We also found variation in injury risk and wound healing with dominance rank and age: Older and low-status females were more likely to be injured than younger or high-status females, and older females exhibited slower healing than younger females. Our results support the idea that wild nonhuman primates experience energetic and immune costs of reproduction and they help illuminate life history trade-offs in long-lived species.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation for the majority of the data represented here, most recently through IOS 1053461, IBN 9985910, IBN 0322613, IBN 0322781, BCS 0323553, BCS 0323596, DEB 0846286, DEB 0846286, DEB 0846532, and IOS 0919200. We are also grateful to the National Institute of Aging (R01AG034513-01 and P01AG031719) and the Princeton Center for the Demography of Aging (P30AG024361). We also thank the Chicago Zoological Society, the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for Demography, and the National Geographic Society. We thank the Office of the President of the Republic of Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service, its Amboseli staff and Wardens, the members of the Amboseli-Longido pastoralist communities, and the Institute for Primate Research in Nairobi for their cooperation and assistance. We are also grateful to the Amboseli Baboon Project long-term field team (R.S. Mututua, S. Sayialel, and J.K. Warutere) and to V. Somen and T. Wango for their assistance in Nairobi. Several people contributed to long-term data collection, especially the late G. Hausfater, who established the protocol for this data set, and N. Learn, L. Opkala, and K. Pinc, who prepared the database for analyses.

Data accessibility

Data sets on observations of injuries and rates of wound healing will be deposited in Dryad (http://datadryad.org/).

Ethical standards

All protocols were noninvasive and adhered to the laws and guidelines of Kenya (Kenya Research Permit numbers NCST RRI/12/1/SS011/1543 to EAA, NCST 5/002/R/777 to SCA, and NCST 5/002/R/776 to JA). All protocols were approved by the Animal Care and Use Committees at the University of Notre Dame (13-030), Duke University (A0840903), and Princeton University (1689).

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Correspondence to Elizabeth A. Archie.

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Communicated by J. B. Silk

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Archie, E.A., Altmann, J. & Alberts, S.C. Costs of reproduction in a long-lived female primate: injury risk and wound healing. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 68, 1183–1193 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-014-1729-4

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