Weaning in primates is a fascinating process in which ingestion of mother’s milk, as a proportion of daily dietary intake, incrementally declines as the infant ages. From moment to moment, this exquisite negotiation of nipple access between mother and infant can vary in relation to food availability, maternal style, and the compelling power of the infant demand (aka weaning tantrum). Oh and lots of other factors can influence the weaning process too. Field Museum, Chicago One of the more remarkable features of human development is that cessation of breastfeeding occurs earlier for us than for our closest ape relatives. This is not just an artifact of a modern industrial world. In 2001, Dan Sellen reviewed >100 non-industrial populations using demographic and ethnographic records. The average age of the introduction of supplemental solids was estimated to be ~5 months (±4 months) and cessation of breastfeeding on average was estimated to be ~30 months (...
I am currently polishing a manuscript for submission (hence the obvious necessity of working on a blog post, next I will clean my bathroom tile). Delving deep into the literature to precisely contextualize my results, I despair that I will never be able to read ALL the things. For example, entering two key search terms- ‘lactation’ and ‘glucocorticoids’- returns 24,800 results in Google Scholar . John Medbury (LAZY J Studios) Reading all that is just not going to happen. Merely identifying the most pertinent papers can be challenging. And with every new literature search, I discover articles that I clearly should have read ages ago. Um especially when I was writing this . I had that sinking feeling yesterday as I read a killer review. In the text the authors described an exciting dynamic; high food intake, high cortisol concentrations in mother’s milk, and high activity in kittens covary while low food intake, low cortisol concentrations in mother’s milk, and low acti...
Comments
Post a Comment