In many contexts, animals assess each other using signals that vary continuously across
individuals and, on average, reflect variation in the quality of the signaller 1 , 2 . It is often …

10.7554/eLife.47433.001 Early life adversity can affect an individual’s health, survival, and
fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes …

Primate offspring often depend on their mothers well beyond the age of weaning, and
offspring that experience maternal death in early life can suffer substantial reductions in fitness …

Social experiences are strongly associated with individuals’ health, aging, and survival in
many mammalian taxa, including humans. Despite their role as models of many other …

Sexually selected feticide—the death of infants in utero as a result of male behaviour—has
only rarely been described or analysed, although it is presumed to be favoured by the same …

Across group-living animals, linear dominance hierarchies lead to disparities in access to
resources, health outcomes and reproductive performance. Studies of how dominance rank …

Background Social behavior and social organization have major influences on individual
health and fitness. Yet, biomedical research focuses on studying a few genotypes under …

Sexually selected infanticide has been the subject of intense empirical and theoretical study
for decades; a related phenomenon, male‐mediated prenatal loss, has received much less …

Signalers may benefit in some contexts from advertising their ages, for example in courting
potential mates. Receivers in turn may benefit from assessing a signaler’s age, even in cases …

Colour signals of many animals are surrounded by a high-contrast achromatic background,
but little is known about the possible function of this arrangement. For both humans and non-…