Table 1. Early adverse conditions and the frequencies with which they occur in maternal and offspring generations of our dataset.
Adverse Condition* | Criterion | Frequency | |
---|---|---|---|
Maternal Generation | Offspring Generation | ||
Drought | During the first year of life, the focal individual experienced less than 200 mm of rainfall (i.e., drought conditions; Beehner et al., 2006). | 0.09 | 0.15 |
High Social Density | The individual was born into a group with a high social density (>35 adults), indicating high levels of within-group competition. | 0.06 | 0.32 |
Maternal Loss | The mother of the focal individual died within four years of the individual’s birth. | 0.21 | 0.25 |
Low Maternal Rank† | The focal individual was born to a mother with a low social rank (mother’s rank fell in the bottom quartile of the group’s dominance hierarchy, rank < 0.25). | 0.17 | 0.23 |
Close-In-Age Younger Sibling‡ | The focal individual had a younger sibling born to its mother within 18 months of the focal’s birth. | 0.20 | -- |
*These criteria were used in a previous analysis in our population (Tung et al., 2016), with the exception of maternal rank, which is evaluated here as a proportional measure rather than an ordinal one as in the previous analysis.
†Proportional rank is the proportion of other adult females in a group that an individual’s mother outranks. The reduced frequency with which low maternal rank appears in the maternal generation is a likely a result of offspring of low-ranking mothers surviving less well (Silk et al., 2003), and therefore not surviving to appear as mothers in our dataset.
‡We excluded the birth of a close-in-age younger sibling for the offspring generation to avoid including a potential reverse-causal factor in our model: the closest-in-age siblings in our dataset occur as a result of the focal offspring’s death, because female baboons (who are not seasonal reproducers) accelerate their next conception after the death of a dependent offspring.