Biology subjects

Gesquiere, L. R.

Publications and source records attributed to Gesquiere, L. R..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Longitudinal changes in gut microbiota across reproductive states in wild baboons

BackgroundIn humans and other mammals, female reproduction is linked to extensive changes in physiology, immunity, hormones, and behavior. These changes likely shape, and may be shaped by, the composition of gut microbial communities. Characterizing the dynamics of gut microbial change across reproductive states, including its relationship to female physiology, is important for understanding how the gut microbiota influences female and offspring health. ResultsHere we characterize longitudinal changes in gut microbiota across reproduction by combining 16S rRNA gene sequencing data from 4,462 stool samples (spanning 14 years of sample collection) with life history data on multiple reproductive events in 169 female baboons. These baboons were members of a well-studied, natural baboon population in Kenya where reproductive state (ovarian cycling, pregnancy, and postpartum amenorrhea) is tracked daily and microbiota data could be paired with measurements of fecal-derived estrogen, progesterone, and glucocorticoid levels. We found extensive changes in baboon gut microbiota as females transitioned between reproductive states. Pregnancy was linked to distinct patterns of ASV richness, community composition, and taxonomic abundances compared to postpartum amenorrhea and ovarian cycling. The most dramatic shifts occurred as females transitioned from the first to second trimester of pregnancy, with altered abundances of taxa that have been linked, in humans and model systems, to host immunity, weight gain, or hormone levels. Host identity was consistently the strongest predictor of gut microbiota composition across states, and this individual signature was strongest during pregnancy. Estrogen and progesterone levels had robust associations with the gut microbiota overall, but the microbial taxa involved in these associations were reproductive state-dependent. Glucocorticoid concentrations were not a major predictor of gut microbiota composition in any state. ConclusionsTogether, our results support the idea that gut microbiota contribute to the complex physiological changes necessary during pregnancy, but that microbial changes during pregnancy are somewhat unique to each female. Variation in steroid hormones is associated with some, but not all, of these relationships, emphasizing the importance of considering steroid hormone levels in studies of gut microbiota variation. Our results motivate future work on how gut microbiota contribute to reproductive outcomes, including both maternal and offspring health.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2025

Demographic, behavioral, and ecological data from a long-term field study of wild baboons in Amboseli, Kenya

Long-term data sets on individually recognized animals and their environments are critical to understanding animal behavior, evolution, and ecology. However, they are resource- and time-intensive and seldom made publicly available. The Amboseli Baboon Research Project (ABRP) is one of the longest-running studies of a wild mammal population in the world and has collected extensive data on the baboon population of the Amboseli ecosystem in Kenya since 1971. Here, we describe four ABRP data sets newly available to the evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, and primatology communities: (1) the sizes and demographic compositions of 21 social groups from 1971-2023; (2) the activity budgets of adult females and immatures from 1984-2023; (3) behavioral data on diet for adult females and immatures from 1984-2023; and (4) weather data, including precipitation from 1976-2023 and temperature from 1976-2022. Data are aggregated annually and monthly to enable cross-data set analyses. These data offer a rare longitudinal perspective on behavioral and ecological change in a wild mammal population.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Synchrony and idiosyncrasy in the gut microbiome of wild primates

Human gut microbial dynamics are highly individualized, making it challenging to link microbiota to health and to design universal microbiome therapies. This individuality is typically attributed to variation in host genetics, diets, environments, and medications, but it could also emerge from fundamental ecological forces that shape microbiota more generally. Here we leverage extensive gut microbial time series from wild baboons--hosts who experience little interindividual dietary and environmental heterogeneity--to test whether gut microbial dynamics are synchronized across hosts or largely idiosyncratic. Despite their shared lifestyles, baboon microbiome dynamics were only weakly synchronized. The strongest synchrony occurred among baboons living in the same social group, likely because group members range over the same habitat and simultaneously encounter the same sources of food and water. However, this synchrony was modest compared to each hosts personalized dynamics. Indeed, host-specific factors, especially host identity, explained 10 times the deviance in longitudinal microbial dynamics, compared to factors shared across hosts. These results contribute to mounting evidence that highly idiosyncratic gut microbiomes are not an artifact of modern human environments, and that synchronizing forces in the gut microbiome (e.g., shared environments, diets, and microbial dispersal) are often not strong enough to overwhelm drivers of microbiome personalization, including host genetics, priority effects, horizontal gene transfer, and functional redundancy.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Comparing proportional and ordinal dominance ranks reveals multiple competitive landscapes in an animal society

Across group-living animals, linear dominance hierarchies lead to disparities in access to resources, health outcomes, and reproductive performance. Studies of how dominance rank affects these outcomes typically employ one of several dominance rank metrics without examining the assumptions each metric makes about its underlying competitive processes. Here we compare the ability of two dominance rank metrics--ordinal rank and proportional or standardized rank--to predict 20 distinct traits in a well-studied wild baboon population in Amboseli, Kenya. We propose that ordinal rank best predicts outcomes when competition is density-dependent, while proportional rank best predicts outcomes when competition is density-independent. We found that for 75% (15/20) of the traits, one of the two rank metrics performed better than the other. Strikingly, all male traits were better predicted by ordinal than by proportional rank, while female traits were evenly split between being better predicted by proportional or ordinal rank. Hence, male and female traits are shaped by different competitive regimes: males competitive environments are largely driven by density-dependent resource access (e.g., access to estrus females), while females competitive environments are shaped by both density-independent resource access (e.g. distributed food resources) and density-dependent resource access. However, traits related to competition for social and mating partners are an exception to this sex-biased pattern: these traits were better predicted by ordinal rank than by proportional rank for both sexes. We argue that this method of comparing how different rank metrics predict traits of interest can be used as a way to distinguish between different competitive processes operating in animal societies.

animal behavior and cognition↗