Mirkka Lahdenperä

University of Turku | UTU · Department of Biology

Lack of maternal milk commonly leads to Asian elephant calves’ death in captivity. Currently, available supplements seem inefficient. Hence, we aimed at characterizing the composition of Asian elephant milk to provide information on calves’ nutritional needs. Seventy milk samples from 22 Asian elephants living in semi-captivity in their natural env...

Background The transition to retirement is a significant turning point in life, which may lead to changes in food habits. Objective To examine changes in red meat, fish, vegetables and fruit consumption during the retirement transition and whether these changes vary between sociodemographic groups. Methods The data were from the Whitehall II stud...

Fertility dynamics are key drivers of demographic change in a population. Fertility resilience is likely to vary by socioeconomic class, yet little investigated. Using a unique dataset tracking the reproduction of family lineages for 150 years, we explored childlessness by socioeconomic status and sex during the demographic transition and recurring...

A quarter of Asian elephants are captive, with greater than 90% of these tamed and cared for by handlers (mahouts) in Asia. Although taming is a much-discussed welfare issue, no studies to our knowledge have empirically assessed its impact on calves, and dialogue surrounding taming often lacks perspectives of those involved. Here, we interviewed ma...

Reproductive senescence is widespread across mammals, but only a small number of species have physiological reproductive cessation and an extended post-reproductive lifespan. A recent commentary in Cell by Winkler & Goncalves (2023) suggests that menopause is actually a widespread trait of mammals, which would change our understanding of senescence...

Dispersal does not only mean moving from one environment to another, but can also refer to shifting from one social group to another. Individual characteristics such as sex, age and family structure might influence an individual's propensity to disperse. In this study, we use a unique dataset of an evacuated World War II Finnish population, to test...

Although grandparents are and have been important alloparents to their grandchildren, they are not necessarily only beneficial but can also compete with grandchildren over limited resources. Competition over parental care or other resources may exist especially if grandparents live in the same household with grandchildren and it can be dependent on...

Increased exposure to greener environments has been suggested to lead to health benefits in children, but the associated mechanisms in early life, particularly via biological mediators such as altered maternal milk composition, remain largely unexplored. We investigated the associations between properties of the mother’s residential green environme...

Parental self-efficacy (PSE), a measure of the subjective competence in the parental role, has been linked with child well-being and health. Research on the influence of PSE on child eating habits is scarce, and the few studies have concentrated on certain food groups, such as vegetables or fruits, and have mostly included only maternal PSE. Thus,...

Frequent social interactions, proximity to conspecifics, and group density are main drivers of infections and parasite transmissions. However, recent theoretical and empirical studies suggest that the health benefits of sociality and group living can outweigh the costs of infection and help social individuals fight infections or increase their infe...

Ruokatottumukset siirtyvät sukupolvelta toiselle. Lasten syntymä saattaa olla otollinen kohta vanhemmille muuttaa omaa ruokakäyttäytymistään parempaan suuntaan. Alueelliset erot voivat kuitenkin rajoittaa lapsiperheiden mahdollisuuksia ruokakäyttäytymisen muuttamiseen. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää äidin ja isän ruokavalioiden samankaltaisu...

Background: Many environmental factors are known to hinder breastfeeding, yet the role of the family living environment in this regard is still poorly understood. Objectives: Therefore, we used data from a large cohort to identify associations between neighborhood characteristics and breastfeeding behavior. Methods: Our observational study inc...

Child obesity risk, child eating behavior and parental feeding practices show a graded association with individual level socioeconomic status. However, their associations with neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage are largely unknown. In this study (n = 682), we investigated how parental feeding practices and child eating behaviors were associate...

Although social behaviour is common in group-living mammals, our understanding of its mechanisms in long-lived animals is largely based on studies in human and non-human primates. There are health and fitness benefits associated with strong social ties, including increased life span, reproductive success, and lower disease risk, which are attribute...

A good quality diet in childhood is important for optimal growth as well as for long-term health. It is not well established how eating behaviors affect overall diet quality in childhood. Moreover, very few studies have considered the association of diet quality and a neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage in childhood. Our aim was to investigate...

Although senescence is often observed in the wild, its underlying mechanistic causes can rarely be studied alongside its consequences, because data on health, molecular and physiological measures of senescence are rare. Documenting how different age-related changes in health accelerate ageing at a mechanistic level is key if we are to better unders...

Many mammals grow up with siblings, and interactions between them can influence offspring phenotype and fitness. Among these interactions, sibling competition between different‐age offspring should lead to reproductive and survival costs on the younger sibling, while sibling cooperation should improve younger sibling's reproductive potential and su...

Objectives Mental health is determined by social, biological, and cultural factors and is sensitive to life transitions. We examine how psychosocial working conditions, social living environment, and cumulative risk factors are associated with mental health changes during the retirement transition. Method We use data from the Finnish Retirement an...

Working animals spend hours each day in close contact with humans and require training to understand commands and fulfil specific tasks. However, factors driving cooperation between humans and animals are still unclear, and novel situations may present challenges that have been little-studied to-date. We investigated factors driving cooperation bet...

Help is directed towards kin in many cooperative species, but its nature and intensity can vary by context. Humans are one of few species in which grandmothers invest in grandchildren, and this may have served as an important driver of our unusual life history. But helping behaviour is hardly uniform, and insight into the importance of grandmotheri...

Human activities interfere with wild animals and lead to the loss of many animal populations. Therefore, efforts have been made to understand how wildlife can rebound from anthropogenic disturbances. An essential mechanism to adapt to environmental and social changes is the fluctuations in the host gut microbiome. Here we give a comprehensive descr...

Declining wild populations combined with accumulating captive populations of e.g. livestock, pets, draught and zoo animals have resulted in some threatened species with substantial proportions of their populations in captivity. The interactions animals have with humans in captivity depend on handler familiarity and relationship quality and can affe...

Grandmothers play a crucial role in families enhancing grandchild wellbeing and survival but their effects can be context-dependent, and the children born in poor conditions are most likely to benefit from the investments made by helping grandmothers. In this study, we examined, for the first time, whether grandmothers' presence modified associatio...

The nutritional content of milk from free-living Asian elephants has not previously been reported, despite being vital for better management of captive populations. This study analyzed both milk composition and consumed plant species of Asian elephants managed in their natural environment in Myanmar. Longitudinal samples (n = 36) were obtained duri...

Understanding factors preventing populations of endangered species from being self-sustaining is vital for successful conservation, but we often lack sufficient data to understand dynamics. The global Asian elephant population has halved since the 1950s, however >25% currently live in captivity and effective management is essential to maintain viab...

Recognising stress is an important component in maintaining the welfare of captive animal populations, and behavioural observation provides a rapid and non-invasive method to do this. Despite substantial testing in zoo elephants, there has been relatively little interest in the application of behavioural assessments to the much larger working popul...

Background: The existence of extended post-reproductive lifespan is an evolutionary puzzle, and its taxonomic prevalence is debated. One way of measuring post-reproductive life is with post-reproductive representation, the proportion of adult years lived by females after cessation of reproduction. Analyses of post-reproductive representation in ma...

Capturing wild animals is common for conservation, economic or research purposes. Understanding how capture itself affects lifetime fitness measures is often difficult because wild and captive populations live in very different environments and there is a need for long-term life-history data. Here, we show how wild capture influences reproduction i...

In cooperatively breeding species, extended living in natal families after maturity is often associated with limited breeding possibilities and the ability to gain indirect fitness from helping relatives, with family dynamics, such as parental presence and relatedness between family members, playing a key role in determining the timing of own repro...

Preferential treatment of kin is widespread across social species and is considered a central prerequisite to the evolution of cooperation through kin selection. Though it is well known that, among most social mammals, females will remain within their natal group and often bias social behaviour towards female maternal kin, less is known about the f...

Personality, i.e. consistent between-individual differences in behaviour, has been documented in many species. Yet little is known about how males and females of long-lived, highly social species differ in their measures of personality structure. We investigated sex differences in the mean, variance, and covariance of three previously reported pers...

Recent advances in medicine and life-expectancy gains have fueled multidisciplinary research into the limits of human lifespan [1, 2, 3]. Ultimately, how long humans can live for may depend on selection favoring extended longevity in our evolutionary past [4]. Human females have an unusually extended post-reproductive lifespan, which has been expla...

The current extinction crisis leaves us increasingly reliant on captive populations to maintain vulnerable species. Approximately one third of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are living in semi-captive conditions in range countries. Their relationship with humans stretches back millennia, yet elephants have never been fully domesticated. We rely...

Effect of mahout and elephant characteristics on PCA components (i) ‘Job appreciation ‘; (ii) ‘Experience is necessary’; (iii) ‘Human-elephant interaction’ (iv) ‘Own knowledge’ and (v) ‘Relationship with elephant’. * shows statistical significance and—shows terms missing from final model. Sample sizes are as follows: (i) n = 89 (ii) n = 93 (iii) n...

File containing data from mahout questionnaires. (CSV)

Number of responses given for each question in both the expert (E) and mahout (M) questionnaires and answer options where applicable. Question style is denoted as O (Open ended), M (Multiple choice) or L (Likert scale). (DOCX)

File containing data from expert questionnaires. (CSV)

BACKGROUND The human female reproductive lifespan is regulated by the dynamics of ovarian function, which in turn is influenced by several factors: from the basic molecular biological mechanisms governing folliculogenesis, to environmental and lifestyle factors affecting the ovarian reserve between conception and menopause. From a broader point of...

The original version of this Article incorrectly cited as Ref. 45 the paper ‘Lynch, E. C., Lahdenperä, M., Mar, K. U. & Lummaa, V. The evolutionary significance of maternal kinship in a long-lived mammal. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B (2018, in press)’ in the eighth sentence of the last paragraph of the Introduction, and the last sentence of the f...

Wild-capture of numerous species is common for diverse purposes, including medical experiments, conservation, veterinary interventions and research, but little objective data exists on its consequences. We use exceptional demographic records on Asian elephants from timber camps in Myanmar to investigate the long-term consequences of wild-capture du...

Grandmothers provide key care to their grandchildren in both contemporary and historic human populations. The length of the grandmother-grandchild relationship provides a basis for such interactions, but its variation and determinants have rarely been studied in different contexts, despite changes in age-specific mortality and fertility rates likel...

Data on personality for long-lived, highly-social wild mammals with high cognitive abilities are rare. We investigated the personality structure of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) by using a large sample of semi-captive timber elephants in Myanmar. Data were collected during 2014 to 2017 using questionnaires, for which elephant riders (mahouts) r...

The level of kin help often depends on the degree of relatedness between a helper and the helped. In humans, grandmother help is known to increase the survival of grandchildren, though this benefit can differ between maternal grandmothers (MGMs) and paternal grandmothers (PGMs) and between grandsons and granddaughters. The X-linked grandmother hypo...

Costly reproductive competition among females is predicted to lead to strategies that reduce these costs, such as reproductive schedules. Simultaneous births of coresident women in human families can reduce their infant survival, but whether such competition also affects overall birth rates and whether females time their pregnancies to avoid simult...

The importance of grandparents for their grandchildren is well-studied in several disciplines, and studies are now also addressing the potential effects of grandchildren on grandparental wellbeing. Any such effects are limited by the time grandparents share with their grandchildren. Changing child mortality rates, grandparental longevity, and child...

The limited availability of resources is predicted to impose trade-offs between growth, reproduction and self-maintenance in animals. However, whilst some studies have shown that early reproduction suppresses growth, reproduction positively correlates with size in others. We use detailed records from a large population of semi-captive elephants in...

Usually animals reproduce into old age, but a few species such as humans and killer whales can live decades after their last reproduction. The grandmother hypothesis proposes that such life-history evolved through older females switching to invest in their existing (grand)offspring, thereby increasing their inclusive fitness and selection for post-...

Studying the evolution of cooperative breeding and group living requires simultaneous quantification of both helping benefits and competitive costs within groups. Although such research has traditionally focused on the fitness benefits of helping behavior, increasing evidence now highlights reproductive competition in cooperatively breeding animals...

Long-lived, highly social species with prolonged offspring dependency can show long postreproductive periods. The Mother hypothesis proposes that a need for extended maternal care of offspring together with increased maternal mortality risk associated with old age select for such postreproductive survival, but tests in species with long postreprodu...

Introduction Short post-reproductive lifespan is widespread across species, but prolonged post-reproductive life-stages of potential adaptive significance have been reported only in few mammals with extreme longevity. Long post-reproductive lifespan contradicts classical evolutionary predictions of simultaneous senescence in survival and reproducti...

Personality, that is, individual behavioral tendencies that are relatively stable across situations and time, has been associated with number of offspring in many animals, including humans, suggesting that some personality traits may be under natural selection. However, there are no data on whether these associations between personality and reprodu...

The evolutionary theory of senescence posits that as the probability of extrinsic mortality increases with age, selection should favour early-life over late-life reproduction. Studies on natural vertebrate populations show early reproduction may impair later-life performance, but the consequences for lifetime fitness have rarely been determined, an...

The evolutionary theory of senescence posits that as the probability of extrinsic mortality increases with age, selection should favour early-life over late-life reproduction. Studies on natural vertebrate populations show early reproduction may impair later-life performance, but the consequences for lifetime fitness have rarely been determined, an...

A comparison of single-threshold models analyzing ageing-related variation in annual breeding success in females aged 5–50. Table S2. A comparison of two-threshold models analyzing ageing-related variation in annual breeding success in females aged 5–50. Table S3. A comparison of Cox proportional hazards models investigating survival following the...

Human menopause is ubiquitous among women and is uninfluenced by modernity. In addition, it remains an evolutionary puzzle: studies have largely failed to account for diminishing selection on reproduction beyond 50 years. Using a 200-year dataset on pre-industrial Finns, we show that an important component is between-generation reproductive conflic...

Juvenile mortality is a key factor influencing population growth rate in density-independent, predation-free, well-managed captive populations. Currently at least a quarter of all Asian elephants live in captivity, but both the wild and captive populations are unsustainable with the present fertility and calf mortality rates. Despite the need for d...

Evolutionary theory suggests that natural selection should synchronize senescence of reproductive and somatic systems. In some species, females show dramatic discordance in senescence rates in these systems, leading to a clear menopause coupled with prolonged postreproductive life span. The Mother Hypothesis proposes that menopause evolved to avoid...

Humans are exceptionally long-lived for mammals of their size. In men, lifespan is hypothesized to evolve from benefits of reproduction throughout adult life. We use multi-generational data from pre-industrial Finland, where remarriage was possible only after spousal death, to test selection pressures on male longevity in four monogamous population...

In many animals, including humans, the ability of females to reproduce depends not only on their survival to each age but also on being pair-bonded to a mate. Exposure of the genetic variation underlying fecundity to natural selection should therefore depend on the proportion of females both alive and pair-bonded. In spite of this, female "marital"...

Life-history theory suggests that individuals should live until their reproductive potential declines, and the lifespan of human men is consistent with this idea. However, because women can live long after menopause and this prolonged post-reproductive life can be explained, in part, by the fitness enhancing effects of grandmothering, an alternativ...

Menopause is associated with an ultimate cessation of child-bearing potential. Medical research on menopause focuses mostly on the underlying physiological changes associated with menopause. By contrast, evolutionary biologists are interested in understanding why women lose their potential to reproduce before the end of their lives. Evolution by na...

Most animals reproduce until they die, but in humans, females can survive long after ceasing reproduction. In theory, a prolonged post-reproductive lifespan will evolve when females can gain greater fitness by increasing the success of their offspring than by continuing to breed themselves. Although reproductive success is known to decline in old a...