Doctoral Dissertation Research: Reproductive trade-offs in female primates

包括女性在内的雌性灵长类动物在怀孕和哺乳期间消耗了大量的能量，限制了可分配给其他生理功能的能量，并可能形成健康、衰老和死亡率的长期趋势。本博士论文项目将研究雌性繁殖对野生雌性黑猩猩的生理影响，使用非侵入性收集的两个黑猩猩种群的人口统计、激素、遗传、寄生虫和病毒数据。黑猩猩，我们现存的近亲灵长类动物，提供了一个重要的雌性生殖权衡的比较模型，特别是考虑到人类研究被生育控制、婴儿补充、医疗保健和儿童保育援助所混淆。这项研究产生的信息将有助于了解妇女健康的基本生物学基础。学生共同负责人将通过多个场所开展科学教育和保护外展活动，包括为来自STEM领域代表性不足的社区的K-9学校儿童设计的灵长类动物和寄生虫移动探索站，以及关于项目成果和实地指导在科学研究和黑猩猩保护中的重要性的研讨会。据预测，用于生产和照顾婴儿的能量分配会对人类和非人类灵长类动物的长期健康和生存产生成本，而这些类型的权衡对于理解现代人类生活史具有潜在的重要意义。这一提议在野生黑猩猩身上验证了三个假设，包括：1)繁殖的高成本会对雌性黑猩猩的免疫功能产生负面影响；2)有效能值较高的雌虫生殖免疫成本较低；3)雌性遗传质量调节生殖免疫成本。两种寄生虫系统将被用作免疫功能的代理，包括蠕虫和病毒。这项研究是高度跨学科的，为黑猩猩中与年龄相关的疾病模式提供了新的数据，并可能针对人类延长寿命进化的重要因素。

Female primates, including women, expend considerable energy during pregnancy and breastfeeding, limiting the energy that can be allocated to other physiological functions, and potentially shaping long-term trends in well-being, aging, and mortality. This doctoral dissertation project will investigate the physiological impacts of female reproduction for wild female chimpanzees, using non-invasively collected demographic, hormonal, genetic, parasitic, and viral data in two chimpanzee populations. Chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives, provide an important comparative model of female reproductive trade-offs, especially given that human studies are confounded by fertility control, infant supplementation, medical care, and childcare assistance. The information generated by this research will help to inform the basic biology underlying women's health. The student co-PI will conduct science education and conservation outreach through a number of venues, including mobile discovery stations on primates and parasites designed for K-9 school children from communities that are underrepresented in the STEM fields, and workshops on project outcomes and the importance of field guides in scientific research and chimpanzee conservation. Energy allocation to producing and caring for infants is predicted to generate costs for long-term health and survival in humans and non-human primates, and these types of trade-offs are potentially important for understanding modern human life history. This proposal tests three hypotheses in wild chimpanzees, including that 1) high costs of reproduction will negatively impact immune function in female chimpanzees; 2) females with higher available energy experience reduced immunological costs of reproduction, and, 3) female genetic quality mediates immunological costs of reproduction. Two parasite systems will be used as proxies for immune function, including a helminth and a virus. This study is highly interdisciplinary, offers novel data on age-associated patterns of disease in chimpanzees, and potentially targets factors salient to the evolution of extended lifespan in humans.