Ashley Mensing, Dept of Anthropology, UCLA. Title: Early life adversity and life history correlates in wild white-faced capuchins: physiological mechanisms and fitness outcomes
2026-06-01 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 352 Haines Hall
Abstract:
Organisms that develop under adversity often differ from their peers in stress physiology, behavior, and reproductive timing. Life history frameworks offer a powerful lens for making sense of this variation, proposing that these differences reflect developmental responses calibrated to early environmental conditions. Yet the mechanistic pathway connecting early adversity to physiological changes to behavioral shifts to life history outcomes has rarely been traced empirically within wild populations, leaving core assumptions about how this process unfolds largely untested.
I draw on long-term data from the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project in Costa Rica to examine whether early adversity in wild white-faced capuchins (Cebus imitator) generates the downstream physiological, behavioral, and life history changes that these frameworks anticipate. I first characterize early environmental harshness and its relationship to stress physiology, then ask whether physiological variation connects to behavioral and life history shifts in the expected directions. By tracing this pathway empirically in a wild primate, this work offers a window into how and whether the predictions embedded in life history approaches hold when tested mechanistically in a system with rich longitudinal data. These findings have implications for how we study developmental plasticity and the promises and limitations of applying life history frameworks to individual-level developmental trajectories.
This talk will be presented via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94308730584?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 943 0873 0584
Passcode: [REDACTED]
