Nga Nguyen: CSU Fullerton

Maternal care is the most significant measure of successful adaptation among female mammals. Understanding the predictors of individual differences in offspring care is a major objective of mammalian reproductive biology. In this talk, I will evaluate the impact of maternal and infant characteristics, maternal hormones, and friendships with males on the mother-infant relationship in wild baboons, and discuss the potential fitness consequences of variation in these variables for mothers and infants. I will also discuss the results of my more recent research on reproductive biology in a wild gelada monkey population inhabiting one of the coldest and highest elevation environments of any non-human primate