Objectives: Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholar... more Objectives: Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholarship. For early career and established scholars, however, navigating the mosaic landscape of public education and science communication, noted for rapid "ecological" succession, can be daunting. Moreover, academics are characterized by diverse skills, motivations, values, positionalities, and temperaments that may differentially incline individuals to particular public translation activities. Methods: Here we briefly contextualize engagement activities within a scholarly portfolio, describe the use of one public education program-March Mammal Madness-to highlight approaches to science communication, and explore essential elements and practical considerations for creating and sustaining outreach pursuits in tandem with other scholarly activities. Results: March Mammal Madness, an annual simulated tournament of living and fossil animal taxa, has reached hundreds of thousands of learners since 2013. This program has provided a platform to communicate research findings from biology and anthropology and showcase numerous scholars in these fields. March Mammal Madness has leveraged tournament devices to intentionally address topics of climate change, capitalist environmental degradation, academic sexism, and racist settler-colonialism. The tournament, however, has also perpetuated implicit biases that need disrupting. Conclusions: By embracing reflexive, selfinterrogative, and growth attitudes, the tournament organizers iteratively refine and improve this public science education program to better align our activities with our values and goals. Our experiences with March Mammal Madness suggest that dispersing science is most sustainable when we combine ancestral adaptations for cooperation, community, and story-telling with good-natured competition in the context of shared experiences and shared values.
OBJECTIVE Early life interindividual variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) reactivity... more OBJECTIVE Early life interindividual variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) reactivity to stress is predictive of later life psychological and physical well-being, including the development of many pathological syndromes that are often sex-biased. A complex and interactive set of environmental and genetic causes for such variation has been implicated by previous studies, though little attention has been paid to nonadditive effects (e.g. dominance, X-linked) or sex-specific genetic effects. METHOD We used a large pedigreed sample of captive 3-4 months old infant rhesus macaques (N = 2,661, 54% female) to fit univariate and multivariate linear mixed quantitative genetic models for four longitudinal blood cortisol samples and three reliable ratings of infant temperament (nervousness, gentleness, confidence) during a mother-infant separation protocol. RESULTS Each trait had a moderate narrow-sense heritability (h², 0.26-0.46), but dominance effects caused the first two cortisol samples to have much larger broad-sense heritabilities (H², 0.57 and 0.77). We found no evidence for X-linked variance or common maternal environment variance. There was a sex difference in heritability of the first cortisol sample (hf² < hm²), suggesting differing genetic architecture of perception of maternal separation and relocation during infancy. Otherwise, genetic covariance matrices for the sexes were very similar. Genetic correlations between cortisol levels and temperament were weak (< |0.4|) but stronger than residual or phenotypic correlations. CONCLUSIONS HPA reactivity and temperament had a primarily additive genetic basis in infant macaques, but there were important complexities to the genetic architecture of including genetic dominance and sex differences in heritability at this early life stage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Breastfeeding and human milk (HM) are critically important to maternal, infant and population hea... more Breastfeeding and human milk (HM) are critically important to maternal, infant and population health. This paper summarizes the proceedings of a workshop that convened a multidisciplinary panel of researchers to identify key priorities and Abbreviations: HM, human milk; DHM, donor human milk.
Adverse experiences during early life exert important effects on development, health, reproductio... more Adverse experiences during early life exert important effects on development, health, reproduction, and social bonds, with consequences often persisting across generations. A mother’s early life experiences can impact her offspring’s development through a number of pathways, such as maternal care, physiological signaling through glucocorticoids, or even intergenerational effects like epigenetic inheritance. Early life adversity in female yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) predicts elevated glucocorticoids, reduced sociality, shortened lifespan, and higher offspring mortality. If baboon mothers with more early life adversity, experience poorer condition and struggle to provide for their offspring, this could contribute to the persisting transgenerational effects of adversity. Here, we examined the effects of mothers’ early life adversity on their maternal effort, physiology, and offspring survivability in a population of olive baboons, Papio anubis. Mothers who experienced more adve...
Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning ... more Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions. We propose that mother-daughter co-residence during this period affords targeted grandmaternal effort during a period of heightened vulnerability and appreciable impact. We conducted two focus groups and 37 semi-structured interviews with Himba women. Interviews focused on experiences from their first and, if applicable, their most recent birth and included information on social support, domains of teaching and learning, and infant feeding practices. Our qualitative findings reveal three domains in which grandmothers contribute: le...
Objectives Lack of microbiota accessible carbohydrates (MAC) can drive gut commensal extinctions.... more Objectives Lack of microbiota accessible carbohydrates (MAC) can drive gut commensal extinctions. Infant formula lacks the MAC found in breastmilk, human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). As a result, a switch from breastmilk feeding (high MAC) to formula (low MAC) may drive extinctions of infant gut commensals. Methods The prevalence of Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis, a bacterium that efficiently consumes HMOs, was compared in cohorts from Austria, Bangladesh, Finland, Gambia, Germany, Switzerland, and United States. Scientific literature reports that both Bangladesh and Gambia have long duration breastfeeding without a history of prevalent formula use; Bangladesh has a mean duration of breastfeeding of 31.9 months and Gambia has a median duration of breastfeeding >18 months. This contrasts with European countries and the US, who all have median duration of breastfeeding <12 months and had a nadir in breastfeeding rates in the 1960 s. Deterministic epidemiological models ...
Mammalian mothers pay heavy energetic costs to fuel the growth of their offspring. These costs ar... more Mammalian mothers pay heavy energetic costs to fuel the growth of their offspring. These costs are highest during lactation. Energy transmitted to offspring in the form of milk must ultimately come from the maternal diet, but there have been few comparative studies of the relationship between milk properties and mammalian diets. We used interspecific data on primate milk composition and wild diets to establish that concentrations of milk protein and sugar are predicted by diet independent of maternal mass, litter mass, and infant parking behavior such that increasing folivory or faunivory increases protein concentration but decreases sugar concentration. Milk energy density is unrelated to diet, though infant parking species do produce more energy-dense milk. While parking effects have been previously explained as a result of mother-infant separation, the mechanisms causing the relationship between nutrient packaging in milk and maternal diet are currently unclear. However, they lik...
Adaptive immune proteins in mothers' milk are more variable than innate immune proteins acros... more Adaptive immune proteins in mothers' milk are more variable than innate immune proteins across populations and subsistence strategies. These results suggest that the immune defenses in milk are shaped by a mother's environment throughout her life. Mother's milk contains immune proteins that play critical roles in protecting the infant from infection and priming the infant's developing immune system during early life. The composition of these molecules in milk, particularly the acquired immune proteins, is thought to reflect a mother's immunological exposures throughout her life. In this study, we examine the composition of innate and acquired immune proteins in milk across seven populations with diverse disease and cultural ecologies. Milk samples ( = 164) were collected in Argentina, Bolivia, Nepal, Namibia, Philippines, Poland and the USA. Populations were classified as having one of four subsistence patterns: urban-industrialism, rural-shop, horticulturalist-f...
Human milk contains essential micronutrients for growth and development during early life. Enviro... more Human milk contains essential micronutrients for growth and development during early life. Environmental pollutants, such as potentially toxic metals, can also be transferred to the infant through human milk. These elements have been well-studied, but changing diets and environments and advances in laboratory technology require re-examining these elements in a variety of settings. The aim of this study was to characterize the concentrations of essential and toxic metals in human milk from four diverse populations. Human milk samples (n = 70) were collected in Argentina (n = 21), Namibia (n = 6), Poland (n = 23), and the United States (n = 20) using a standardized mid-feed collection procedure. Milk concentrations of calcium, zinc, iron, copper, manganese, lead, arsenic, and cadmium were determined using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). We used standard multiple linear regression models to evaluate differences among populations, while including infant age, infan...
Nursing behavior is notoriously difficult to study in arboreal primates, particularly when offspr... more Nursing behavior is notoriously difficult to study in arboreal primates, particularly when offspring suckle inconspicuously in nests. Orangutans have the most prolonged nursing period of any mammal, with the cessation of suckling (weaning) estimated to occur at 6 to 8 years of age in the wild. Milk consumption is hypothesized to be relatively constant over this period, but direct evidence is limited. We previously demonstrated that trace element analysis of bioavailable elements from milk, such as barium, provides accurate estimates of early-life diet transitions and developmental stress when coupled with growth lines in the teeth of humans and nonhuman primates. We provide the first detailed nursing histories of wild, unprovisioned orangutans (Pongo abelii and Pongo pygmaeus) using chemical and histological analyses. Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry was used to determine barium distributions across the teeth of four wild-shot individuals aged from postnat...
Hinde et al. Neural Effects of Separation in a Monogamous Primate to the neurobiology underlying ... more Hinde et al. Neural Effects of Separation in a Monogamous Primate to the neurobiology underlying response to a novel female. Reunion with the partner appeared to stimulate coordinated release of central and peripheral OT. The observed changes suggest the involvement of OT and AVP systems, as well as limbic and striatal areas, during separation and reunion from the pair mate.
Unavoidable sample size issues beset psychological research that involves scarce populations or c... more Unavoidable sample size issues beset psychological research that involves scarce populations or costly laboratory procedures. When incorporating longitudinal designs these samples are further reduced by traditional modeling techniques, which perform listwise deletion for any instance of missing data. Moreover, these techniques are limited in their capacity to accommodate alternative correlation structures that are common in repeated measures studies. Researchers require sound quantitative methods to work with limited but valuable measures without degrading their data sets. This article provides a brief tutorial and exploration of two alternative longitudinal modeling techniques, linear mixed effects models and generalized estimating equations, as applied to a repeated measures study ( n = 12) of pairmate attachment and social stress in primates. Both techniques provide comparable results, but each model offers unique information that can be helpful when deciding the right analytic t...
American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, Jan 6, 2015
Breastfeeding has been associated with numerous health and well-being benefits for both children ... more Breastfeeding has been associated with numerous health and well-being benefits for both children and their mothers, including prolonging the birth interval to the subsequent sibling. The clearest associations between breastfeeding and health outcomes, per se, reflect exclusive breastfeeding in the first months of postnatal life and are most evident during infancy. Fewer studies explore the consequences of breastfeeding for multiple years. In this article, we ask whether breastfeeding for more than 2 years is associated with discernible health and well-being benefits to children. Data were collected from 315 children, aged 2 to 7, and their caretakers residing in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Basic demographic and health information was solicited, and anthropometric and blood markers of health were evaluated. Our results indicate a strong positive relationship between breastfeeding for 2 or more years and interbirth interval, but little evidence for a relationship between prolonged breastfe...
Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
The maternal environment exerts important influences on offspring mass/growth, metabolism, reprod... more The maternal environment exerts important influences on offspring mass/growth, metabolism, reproduction, neurobiology, immune function, and behavior among birds, insects, reptiles, fish, and mammals. For mammals, mother's milk is an important physiological pathway for nutrient transfer and glucocorticoid signaling that potentially influences offspring growth and behavioral phenotype. Glucocorticoids in mother's milk have been associated with offspring behavioral phenotype in several mammals, but studies have been handicapped by not simultaneously evaluating milk energy density and yield. This is problematic as milk glucocorticoids and nutrients likely have simultaneous effects on offspring phenotype. We investigated mother's milk and infant temperament and growth in a cohort of rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) mother-infant dyads at the California National Primate Research Center (N = 108). Glucocorticoids in mother's milk, independent of available milk energy, predic...
Milk has been well established as the optimal nutrition source for infants, yet there is still mu... more Milk has been well established as the optimal nutrition source for infants, yet there is still much to be understood about its molecular composition. Therefore, our objective was to develop and compare comprehensive milk proteomes for human and rhesus macaques to highlight differences in neonatal nutrition. We developed a milk proteomics technique that overcomes previous technical barriers including pervasive post-translational modifications and limited sample volume. We identified 1,606 and 518 proteins in human and macaque milk, respectively. During analysis of detected protein orthologs, we identified 88 differentially abundant proteins. Of these, 93% exhibited increased abundance in human milk relative to macaque and include lactoferrin, polymeric immunoglobulin receptor, alpha-1 antichymotrypsin, vitamin D-binding protein, and haptocorrin. Furthermore, proteins more abundant in human milk compared to macaque are associated with development of the gastrointestinal tract, the imm...
Mammalian females pay high energetic costs for reproduction, the greatest of which is imposed by ... more Mammalian females pay high energetic costs for reproduction, the greatest of which is imposed by lactation. The synthesis of milk requires, in part, the mobilization of bodily reserves to nourish developing young. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced to predict how mothers will differentially invest in sons and daughters, however few studies have addressed sexbiased milk synthesis. Here we leverage the dairy cow model to investigate such phenomena. Using 2.39 million lactation records from 1.49 million dairy cows, we demonstrate that the sex of the fetus influences the capacity of the mammary gland to synthesize milk during lactation. Cows favor daughters, producing significantly more milk for daughters than for sons across lactation. Using a sub-sample of this dataset (N = 113,750 subjects) we further demonstrate that the effects of fetal sex interact dynamically across parities, whereby the sex of the fetus being gestated can enhance or diminish the production of milk during an established lactation. Moreover the sex of the fetus gestated on the first parity has persistent consequences for milk synthesis on the subsequent parity. Specifically, gestation of a daughter on the first parity increases milk production by ,445 kg over the first two lactations. Our results identify a dramatic and sustained programming of mammary function by offspring in utero. Nutritional and endocrine conditions in utero are known to have pronounced and long-term effects on progeny, but the ways in which the progeny has sustained physiological effects on the dam have received little attention to date.
Objectives: Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholar... more Objectives: Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholarship. For early career and established scholars, however, navigating the mosaic landscape of public education and science communication, noted for rapid "ecological" succession, can be daunting. Moreover, academics are characterized by diverse skills, motivations, values, positionalities, and temperaments that may differentially incline individuals to particular public translation activities. Methods: Here we briefly contextualize engagement activities within a scholarly portfolio, describe the use of one public education program-March Mammal Madness-to highlight approaches to science communication, and explore essential elements and practical considerations for creating and sustaining outreach pursuits in tandem with other scholarly activities. Results: March Mammal Madness, an annual simulated tournament of living and fossil animal taxa, has reached hundreds of thousands of learners since 2013. This program has provided a platform to communicate research findings from biology and anthropology and showcase numerous scholars in these fields. March Mammal Madness has leveraged tournament devices to intentionally address topics of climate change, capitalist environmental degradation, academic sexism, and racist settler-colonialism. The tournament, however, has also perpetuated implicit biases that need disrupting. Conclusions: By embracing reflexive, selfinterrogative, and growth attitudes, the tournament organizers iteratively refine and improve this public science education program to better align our activities with our values and goals. Our experiences with March Mammal Madness suggest that dispersing science is most sustainable when we combine ancestral adaptations for cooperation, community, and story-telling with good-natured competition in the context of shared experiences and shared values.
OBJECTIVE Early life interindividual variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) reactivity... more OBJECTIVE Early life interindividual variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) reactivity to stress is predictive of later life psychological and physical well-being, including the development of many pathological syndromes that are often sex-biased. A complex and interactive set of environmental and genetic causes for such variation has been implicated by previous studies, though little attention has been paid to nonadditive effects (e.g. dominance, X-linked) or sex-specific genetic effects. METHOD We used a large pedigreed sample of captive 3-4 months old infant rhesus macaques (N = 2,661, 54% female) to fit univariate and multivariate linear mixed quantitative genetic models for four longitudinal blood cortisol samples and three reliable ratings of infant temperament (nervousness, gentleness, confidence) during a mother-infant separation protocol. RESULTS Each trait had a moderate narrow-sense heritability (h², 0.26-0.46), but dominance effects caused the first two cortisol samples to have much larger broad-sense heritabilities (H², 0.57 and 0.77). We found no evidence for X-linked variance or common maternal environment variance. There was a sex difference in heritability of the first cortisol sample (hf² < hm²), suggesting differing genetic architecture of perception of maternal separation and relocation during infancy. Otherwise, genetic covariance matrices for the sexes were very similar. Genetic correlations between cortisol levels and temperament were weak (< |0.4|) but stronger than residual or phenotypic correlations. CONCLUSIONS HPA reactivity and temperament had a primarily additive genetic basis in infant macaques, but there were important complexities to the genetic architecture of including genetic dominance and sex differences in heritability at this early life stage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Breastfeeding and human milk (HM) are critically important to maternal, infant and population hea... more Breastfeeding and human milk (HM) are critically important to maternal, infant and population health. This paper summarizes the proceedings of a workshop that convened a multidisciplinary panel of researchers to identify key priorities and Abbreviations: HM, human milk; DHM, donor human milk.
Adverse experiences during early life exert important effects on development, health, reproductio... more Adverse experiences during early life exert important effects on development, health, reproduction, and social bonds, with consequences often persisting across generations. A mother’s early life experiences can impact her offspring’s development through a number of pathways, such as maternal care, physiological signaling through glucocorticoids, or even intergenerational effects like epigenetic inheritance. Early life adversity in female yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) predicts elevated glucocorticoids, reduced sociality, shortened lifespan, and higher offspring mortality. If baboon mothers with more early life adversity, experience poorer condition and struggle to provide for their offspring, this could contribute to the persisting transgenerational effects of adversity. Here, we examined the effects of mothers’ early life adversity on their maternal effort, physiology, and offspring survivability in a population of olive baboons, Papio anubis. Mothers who experienced more adve...
Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning ... more Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions. We propose that mother-daughter co-residence during this period affords targeted grandmaternal effort during a period of heightened vulnerability and appreciable impact. We conducted two focus groups and 37 semi-structured interviews with Himba women. Interviews focused on experiences from their first and, if applicable, their most recent birth and included information on social support, domains of teaching and learning, and infant feeding practices. Our qualitative findings reveal three domains in which grandmothers contribute: le...
Objectives Lack of microbiota accessible carbohydrates (MAC) can drive gut commensal extinctions.... more Objectives Lack of microbiota accessible carbohydrates (MAC) can drive gut commensal extinctions. Infant formula lacks the MAC found in breastmilk, human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). As a result, a switch from breastmilk feeding (high MAC) to formula (low MAC) may drive extinctions of infant gut commensals. Methods The prevalence of Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis, a bacterium that efficiently consumes HMOs, was compared in cohorts from Austria, Bangladesh, Finland, Gambia, Germany, Switzerland, and United States. Scientific literature reports that both Bangladesh and Gambia have long duration breastfeeding without a history of prevalent formula use; Bangladesh has a mean duration of breastfeeding of 31.9 months and Gambia has a median duration of breastfeeding >18 months. This contrasts with European countries and the US, who all have median duration of breastfeeding <12 months and had a nadir in breastfeeding rates in the 1960 s. Deterministic epidemiological models ...
Mammalian mothers pay heavy energetic costs to fuel the growth of their offspring. These costs ar... more Mammalian mothers pay heavy energetic costs to fuel the growth of their offspring. These costs are highest during lactation. Energy transmitted to offspring in the form of milk must ultimately come from the maternal diet, but there have been few comparative studies of the relationship between milk properties and mammalian diets. We used interspecific data on primate milk composition and wild diets to establish that concentrations of milk protein and sugar are predicted by diet independent of maternal mass, litter mass, and infant parking behavior such that increasing folivory or faunivory increases protein concentration but decreases sugar concentration. Milk energy density is unrelated to diet, though infant parking species do produce more energy-dense milk. While parking effects have been previously explained as a result of mother-infant separation, the mechanisms causing the relationship between nutrient packaging in milk and maternal diet are currently unclear. However, they lik...
Adaptive immune proteins in mothers' milk are more variable than innate immune proteins acros... more Adaptive immune proteins in mothers' milk are more variable than innate immune proteins across populations and subsistence strategies. These results suggest that the immune defenses in milk are shaped by a mother's environment throughout her life. Mother's milk contains immune proteins that play critical roles in protecting the infant from infection and priming the infant's developing immune system during early life. The composition of these molecules in milk, particularly the acquired immune proteins, is thought to reflect a mother's immunological exposures throughout her life. In this study, we examine the composition of innate and acquired immune proteins in milk across seven populations with diverse disease and cultural ecologies. Milk samples ( = 164) were collected in Argentina, Bolivia, Nepal, Namibia, Philippines, Poland and the USA. Populations were classified as having one of four subsistence patterns: urban-industrialism, rural-shop, horticulturalist-f...
Human milk contains essential micronutrients for growth and development during early life. Enviro... more Human milk contains essential micronutrients for growth and development during early life. Environmental pollutants, such as potentially toxic metals, can also be transferred to the infant through human milk. These elements have been well-studied, but changing diets and environments and advances in laboratory technology require re-examining these elements in a variety of settings. The aim of this study was to characterize the concentrations of essential and toxic metals in human milk from four diverse populations. Human milk samples (n = 70) were collected in Argentina (n = 21), Namibia (n = 6), Poland (n = 23), and the United States (n = 20) using a standardized mid-feed collection procedure. Milk concentrations of calcium, zinc, iron, copper, manganese, lead, arsenic, and cadmium were determined using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). We used standard multiple linear regression models to evaluate differences among populations, while including infant age, infan...
Nursing behavior is notoriously difficult to study in arboreal primates, particularly when offspr... more Nursing behavior is notoriously difficult to study in arboreal primates, particularly when offspring suckle inconspicuously in nests. Orangutans have the most prolonged nursing period of any mammal, with the cessation of suckling (weaning) estimated to occur at 6 to 8 years of age in the wild. Milk consumption is hypothesized to be relatively constant over this period, but direct evidence is limited. We previously demonstrated that trace element analysis of bioavailable elements from milk, such as barium, provides accurate estimates of early-life diet transitions and developmental stress when coupled with growth lines in the teeth of humans and nonhuman primates. We provide the first detailed nursing histories of wild, unprovisioned orangutans (Pongo abelii and Pongo pygmaeus) using chemical and histological analyses. Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry was used to determine barium distributions across the teeth of four wild-shot individuals aged from postnat...
Hinde et al. Neural Effects of Separation in a Monogamous Primate to the neurobiology underlying ... more Hinde et al. Neural Effects of Separation in a Monogamous Primate to the neurobiology underlying response to a novel female. Reunion with the partner appeared to stimulate coordinated release of central and peripheral OT. The observed changes suggest the involvement of OT and AVP systems, as well as limbic and striatal areas, during separation and reunion from the pair mate.
Unavoidable sample size issues beset psychological research that involves scarce populations or c... more Unavoidable sample size issues beset psychological research that involves scarce populations or costly laboratory procedures. When incorporating longitudinal designs these samples are further reduced by traditional modeling techniques, which perform listwise deletion for any instance of missing data. Moreover, these techniques are limited in their capacity to accommodate alternative correlation structures that are common in repeated measures studies. Researchers require sound quantitative methods to work with limited but valuable measures without degrading their data sets. This article provides a brief tutorial and exploration of two alternative longitudinal modeling techniques, linear mixed effects models and generalized estimating equations, as applied to a repeated measures study ( n = 12) of pairmate attachment and social stress in primates. Both techniques provide comparable results, but each model offers unique information that can be helpful when deciding the right analytic t...
American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, Jan 6, 2015
Breastfeeding has been associated with numerous health and well-being benefits for both children ... more Breastfeeding has been associated with numerous health and well-being benefits for both children and their mothers, including prolonging the birth interval to the subsequent sibling. The clearest associations between breastfeeding and health outcomes, per se, reflect exclusive breastfeeding in the first months of postnatal life and are most evident during infancy. Fewer studies explore the consequences of breastfeeding for multiple years. In this article, we ask whether breastfeeding for more than 2 years is associated with discernible health and well-being benefits to children. Data were collected from 315 children, aged 2 to 7, and their caretakers residing in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Basic demographic and health information was solicited, and anthropometric and blood markers of health were evaluated. Our results indicate a strong positive relationship between breastfeeding for 2 or more years and interbirth interval, but little evidence for a relationship between prolonged breastfe...
Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
The maternal environment exerts important influences on offspring mass/growth, metabolism, reprod... more The maternal environment exerts important influences on offspring mass/growth, metabolism, reproduction, neurobiology, immune function, and behavior among birds, insects, reptiles, fish, and mammals. For mammals, mother's milk is an important physiological pathway for nutrient transfer and glucocorticoid signaling that potentially influences offspring growth and behavioral phenotype. Glucocorticoids in mother's milk have been associated with offspring behavioral phenotype in several mammals, but studies have been handicapped by not simultaneously evaluating milk energy density and yield. This is problematic as milk glucocorticoids and nutrients likely have simultaneous effects on offspring phenotype. We investigated mother's milk and infant temperament and growth in a cohort of rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) mother-infant dyads at the California National Primate Research Center (N = 108). Glucocorticoids in mother's milk, independent of available milk energy, predic...
Milk has been well established as the optimal nutrition source for infants, yet there is still mu... more Milk has been well established as the optimal nutrition source for infants, yet there is still much to be understood about its molecular composition. Therefore, our objective was to develop and compare comprehensive milk proteomes for human and rhesus macaques to highlight differences in neonatal nutrition. We developed a milk proteomics technique that overcomes previous technical barriers including pervasive post-translational modifications and limited sample volume. We identified 1,606 and 518 proteins in human and macaque milk, respectively. During analysis of detected protein orthologs, we identified 88 differentially abundant proteins. Of these, 93% exhibited increased abundance in human milk relative to macaque and include lactoferrin, polymeric immunoglobulin receptor, alpha-1 antichymotrypsin, vitamin D-binding protein, and haptocorrin. Furthermore, proteins more abundant in human milk compared to macaque are associated with development of the gastrointestinal tract, the imm...
Mammalian females pay high energetic costs for reproduction, the greatest of which is imposed by ... more Mammalian females pay high energetic costs for reproduction, the greatest of which is imposed by lactation. The synthesis of milk requires, in part, the mobilization of bodily reserves to nourish developing young. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced to predict how mothers will differentially invest in sons and daughters, however few studies have addressed sexbiased milk synthesis. Here we leverage the dairy cow model to investigate such phenomena. Using 2.39 million lactation records from 1.49 million dairy cows, we demonstrate that the sex of the fetus influences the capacity of the mammary gland to synthesize milk during lactation. Cows favor daughters, producing significantly more milk for daughters than for sons across lactation. Using a sub-sample of this dataset (N = 113,750 subjects) we further demonstrate that the effects of fetal sex interact dynamically across parities, whereby the sex of the fetus being gestated can enhance or diminish the production of milk during an established lactation. Moreover the sex of the fetus gestated on the first parity has persistent consequences for milk synthesis on the subsequent parity. Specifically, gestation of a daughter on the first parity increases milk production by ,445 kg over the first two lactations. Our results identify a dramatic and sustained programming of mammary function by offspring in utero. Nutritional and endocrine conditions in utero are known to have pronounced and long-term effects on progeny, but the ways in which the progeny has sustained physiological effects on the dam have received little attention to date.
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Papers by Katie Hinde