Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, United States.
Elife. 2019 Sep 24;8:e47433. doi: 10.7554/eLife.47433.
Early life adversity can affect an individual's health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual's offspring is not well understood. We fill this gap by leveraging prospective, longitudinal data on a wild, long-lived primate. We find that juveniles whose mothers experienced early life adversity exhibit high mortality before age 4, independent of the juvenile's own experience of early adversity. These juveniles often preceded their mothers in death by 1 to 2 years, indicating that high adversity females decline in their ability to raise offspring near the end of life. While we cannot exclude direct effects of a parent's environment on offspring quality (e.g., inherited epigenetic changes), our results are completely consistent with a classic parental effect, in which the environment experienced by a parent affects its future phenotype and therefore its offspring's phenotype.
早期生活逆境会对个体在逆境发生多年后的健康、生存和生育能力产生影响。早期生活逆境是否也会对暴露个体的后代产生代际影响，目前还不太清楚。我们利用关于野生长寿灵长类动物的前瞻性、纵向数据填补了这一空白。我们发现，经历过早期逆境的母亲的幼崽在 4 岁之前死亡率很高，这与幼崽自身的早期逆境经历无关。这些幼崽往往会在母亲去世前 1 到 2 年去世，这表明高逆境的雌性在生命结束前丧失了抚养后代的能力。虽然我们不能排除父母环境对后代质量的直接影响（例如，遗传的表观遗传变化），但我们的结果与经典的父母效应完全一致，即父母经历的环境会影响其未来的表型，从而影响其后代的表型。
