The aging baboon: Comparative demography in a non-human primate
- Anne M. Bronikowski*,†,
- Susan C. Alberts‡,§,
- Jeanne Altmann§,¶,‖,
- Craig Packer**,
- K. Dee Carey‡‡, and
- Marc Tatar††,§§
- *Department of Zoology and Genetics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011; †Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706; ‡Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708; §Institute for Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, P.O. Box 24481, Nairobi, Kenya; ¶Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; ‖Department of Conservation Biology, Chicago Zoological Society, Brookfield, IL 60513; **Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108; ‡‡Department of Physiology and Medicine, Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, San Antonio, TX 78245; and ††Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912
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Edited by Kenneth W. Wachter, University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved May 17, 2002 (received for review December 17, 2001)
Abstract
Why do closely related primate genera vary in longevity, and what does this teach us about human aging? Life tables of female baboons (Papio hamadryas) in two wild populations of East Africa and in a large captive population in San Antonio, Texas, provide striking similarities and contrasts to human mortality patterns. For captive baboons at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, we estimate the doubling time of adult mortality rate as 4.8 years. Wild females in free-living populations in Tanzania and in Kenya showed doubling times of 3.5 and 3.8 years, respectively. Although these values are considerably faster than the estimates of 7–8 years for humans, these primates share a demographic feature of human aging: within each taxon populations primarily vary in the level of Gompertz mortality intercept (frailty) and vary little in the demographic rate of aging. Environmental and genetic factors within taxa appear to affect the level of frailty underlying senescence. In contrast, primate taxa are differentiated by rates of demographic aging, even if they cannot be characterized by species-specific lifespan.
Footnotes
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↵ §§ To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: marc_tatar{at}brown.edu.
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This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.
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↵ ¶¶ Bronikowski, A. M., Martin, L. J., Comuzzie, A. G., Mahaney, M. C., Packer, C., Carey, K. D. & Tatar, M. (2001) J. Am. Aging Assoc. 24, 115 (abstr.).
- Abbreviations:
- MRDT,
- mortality rate doubling time;
- SFBR,
- Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research
- Copyright © 2002, The National Academy of Sciences
