Lauren Petrullo

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Psychology

Mismatches between an organism's phenotype and its environment can result in short-term fitness costs. Here, we show that some phenotype-environment mismatch errors can be explained by asymmetrical costs of different types of errors in wild red squirrels. Mothers that mistakenly increased reproductive effort when signals of an upcoming food pulse w...

Androgens offer a window into the timing of important male life history events such as maturation. However, when males are the dispersing sex, piecing together normative androgen profiles across development is challenging because dispersing males are difficult to track. Here, we examined the conditions that may be associated with male androgen stat...

Evolutionary endocrinology aims to understand how natural selection shapes endocrine systems and the degree to which endocrine systems themselves can induce phenotypic responses to environmental changes. Such responses may be specialized in that they reflect past selection for responsiveness only to those ecological factors that ultimately influenc...

Early-life microbial colonization is an important process shaping host physiology,1, 2, 3 immunity,4, 5, 6 and long-term health outcomes7, 8, 9, 10 in humans. However, our understanding of this dynamic process remains poorly investigated in wild animals,11, 12, 13 where developmental mechanisms can be better understood within ecological and evoluti...

The gut microbiome impacts host health and fitness, in part through the diversification of gut metabolic function and pathogen protection. Elevations in glucocorticoids (GCs) appear to reduce gut microbiome diversity in experimental studies, suggesting that a loss of microbial diversity may be a negative consequence of increased GCs. However, given...

A mother’s parity can impact the growth of her offspring, but the mechanisms driving this maternal effect are unclear. Here, we test the hypothesis that vertically transmitted microbiota may be a potential mechanism. We analyzed 118 fecal and milk samples from mother-offspring vervet monkey dyads across the first 6 months of life. Despite poorer mi...

Early-life gut microbial colonization is an important process shaping host physiology, immunity and long-term health outcomes in humans and other animals. However, our understanding of this dynamic process remains poorly investigated in wild animals, where developmental mechanisms can be better understood within ecological and evolutionary relevant...

Gut microbiome diversity plays an important role in host health and fitness, in part through the diversification of gut metabolic function and pathogen protection. Elevations in glucocorticoids (GCs) appear to reduce gut microbiome diversity in experimental studies, suggesting that a loss of microbial diversity may be a negative consequence of incr...

Background: Maternal parity is associated with variation in infant growth across mammals, but the mechanisms underlying this relationship are unclear. Given emerging links between growth and the microbiome, and the importance of maternal microbiota in establishing this community, the assembly of the infant gut microbiome may be a mediator of parity...

Background Adaptive shifts in gut microbiome composition are one route by which animals adapt to seasonal changes in food availability and diet. However, outside of dietary shifts, other potential environmental drivers of gut microbial composition have rarely been investigated, particularly in organisms living in their natural environments. Result...

Animals have evolved numerous strategies to cope with energetic challenges, with dynamic changes to the gut microbiome potentially constituting one such strategy. We tested how proxies of food availability (rainfall) and thermoregulatory stress (temperature) predicted gut microbiome composition of geladas (Theropithecus geladas), a grazing, high-al...

Adverse ecological and social conditions during early life are known to influence development, with rippling effects that may explain variation in adult health and fitness. The adaptive function of such developmental plasticity, however, remains relatively untested in long‐lived animals, resulting in much debate over which evolutionary models are m...

Objectives: In humans and other mammals, maternal hormones are transferred to offspring during lactation via milk and may regulate postnatal development, including the pace of early growth. Here, we used a nonhuman primate model to test the hypotheses that milk cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone-sulfate (DHEAS) concentrations reflect maternal cha...

The human milk microbiome is vertically transmitted to offspring during the postnatal period and has emerged as a critical driver of infant immune and metabolic development. Despite this importance in humans, the milk microbiome of nonhuman primates remains largely unexplored. This dearth of comparative work precludes our ability to understand how...

Restricted variation in numbers of presacral vertebrae in mammals is a classic example of evolutionary stasis. Cervical number is nearly invariable in most mammals, and numbers of thoracolumbar vertebrae are also highly conserved. A recent hypothesis posits that stasis in mammalian presacral count is due to stabilizing selection against the product...

Poor maternal condition during gestation is commonly associated with impaired fetal growth in humans and other animals. Although elevated maternal glucocorticoids (GCs) are often implicated as the mechanism of intrauterine growth stunting, the direct contribution of maternal GCs remains unclear because enzymatic conversion of GCs at the placenta ma...

Early life adversity (ELA) can lead to poor health later in life. However, there is significant variation in outcomes, with some individuals displaying resilience even in the face of adversity. Using longitudinal data collected from free-ranging rhesus macaques between birth and 3 years, we examined whether individual variation in vigilance for thr...

Nearly all mammals possess seven cervical vertebrae, and many groups retain the primitive number of 19 thoracolumbar vertebrae (TL), implying long-term evolutionary stasis. Recently, Galis and colleagues proposed that stabilizing selection for agility and fast running canalizes variation because evolutionary change in TL number can result in incomp...

Early life adversity (ELA) affects physiological and behavioral development. One key component is the relationship between the developing Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis and the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS). Recent studies suggest a relationship between early life adversity and asymmetry in cortisol (a measure of HPA activation) and s...

The vertebral column plays central roles in posture, stability, and locomotion. Its numerical composition is somewhat conserved across phylogenetic groups, which may result from developmental constraints and/or stabilizing selection. Deciphering the role of selection versus constraint in this complex anatomical system is therefore of interest in fu...