VN May 2021

Vetnews | May 2021 7 Leading Article as growing up in very hot and dry years, social factors, such as living in an unusually small or large group, and individual differences, such as being pregnant more often. “Those are the things we know about,” said Alberts, “there’s a whole bunch of horrible things that happen to animals that we just can’t measure.” “Whatever is exposing you to the glucocorticoids is going to shorten your life,” Alberts said. “The more hits you get, the worse your outcome.” Glucocorticoids play all sorts of vital roles in our bodies. They regulate our immunity, help our bodies access energy from sugars and fats, and modulate metabolic reactions to prepare the body for a challenge. But being constantly prepared for a challenge has high costs: maintenance processes get shut down, and fight or flight processes stay active for longer. Over time, these effects accumulate. “This chronic activation of the stress response leads to a caustic downstream physiological environment of not enough immune system, and not enough attention to maintenance,” said Alberts. Associations between stress and survival are extremely difficult to test in a natural scenario. They require very frequent data collection for a very long period of time, in this case through the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, which was launched in 1971. Amboseli females are followed daily from birth to death, their activity is monitored, big events in their lives are recorded, and their faeces are periodically collected. “In my lab we have one of the largest collections of primate behavioural data in the world,” said Alberts, “and also one of the biggest primate poop collections.”More than 14,000 faecal samples were used in this study. Poop is a very valuable, if slightly smelly, repository of information. By measuring hormone levels in faeces rather than in blood or saliva, researchers avoid handling and stressing the animals, which could influence hormone levels. “People have long hypothesised that glucocorticoids play a role in how long you live,” said Campos, “but to our knowledge this is the first direct evidence that chronic exposure to glucocorticoids strongly predicts survival in wild primates.” v CITATION: “Glucocorticoid Exposure Predicts Survival in Female Baboons,”F. A. Campos, E. A. Archie, L. R. Gesquiere, J. Tung, J. Altmann, S. C. Alberts. Science Advances , April 21, 2021. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf6759 (Source :https://today.duke.edu/2021/04/stress-and-death-female- baboons-measured-hormones-poop) Photo: David Stanley, through Wikimedia