Seasonality of reproductive events and early mortality in a colony of hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas hamadryas) over a 30‐year period: Capital breeding and life history patterns in a food‐provisioned population seasonally thermally stressed

Abstract

In environments where energy demands and resource availability vary seasonally, individuals are expected to time the optimal allocation of resources to support survival and reproduction. Although female baboons are regarded as all year round, capital breeders, we wondered how they would respond in an ecological scenario where food were not limiting, foraging effort were negligible, and they were thermally stressed during the cold winter. This study analyzes a 30-year database of conceptions, births, resumptions of postlactational ovarian activity, menarches, and prenatal and early postnatal reproductive failures recorded in a food-provisioned colony of hamadryas baboons located in a temperate zone (40°25'N) to search for seasonal patterns in their life-history patterns and explore its fitness consequences. The results show that the study females exhibited moderate seasonality and behaved like capital breeders; ovarian activity peaked during the period of benign weather conditions (spring and early summer) and births and lactation peaked during the period when they were thermally stressed and faced a negative energy balance (winter). Mistimed conceptions were more likely to fail than timed conceptions were, although this association could be artefactual due to the difficulty to accurately detect prenatal losses. Insolation and, to a lesser extent, temperature were positively associated with conceptions, resumptions of postlactational ovarian activity and onsets of menarche, and negatively associated with births. These findings highlight the extent of plasticity (width of peaks) and resiliency (retention of a capital breeding tactic even under highly seasonally thermally stressful cold conditions) in how primates can adjust their life history patterns and solve tradeoffs in a scenario of strong seasonal variation. Am. J. Primatol. 78:1149-1164, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Energetics in wild female Assamese macaques (Macaca assamensis): a behavioral and physiological approach

“…The positive association between uCP and food availability was found in female apes, chacma baboons, howler monkeys and colobus, i.e. primate species that are typical capital or nonseasonal breeders (Brockman and van Schaik, 2005;Knott, 2001;Polo and Colmenares, 2016;Emery Thompson and Wrangham, 2008;Di Bitetti and Janson, 2000;Teichroeb and Sicotte, 2008). In these species, females reproduce as soon as their energetic condition allow them to do so and they are therefore particularly dependent upon food abundance to invest in reproduction.…”