External workload and cognitive performance of a tactical military scenario-based field exercise.

Introduction: Military personnel must manage a multitude of competing physiological and cognitive stressors while maintaining high levels of performance. Quantifying the external workload and cognitive demands of tactical military field exercises closely simulating operational environments, will provide a better understanding of stressors placed on personnel to inform evidence-based interventions.

Methods: Thirty-one soldiers completing a dismounted 48 hours tactical field exercise, participated in the study.

Balancing Act: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Trade-offs in Reproducing Females.

Trade-offs resulting from the high demand of offspring production are a central focus of many subdisciplines within the field of biology. Yet, despite the historical and current interest on this topic, large gaps in our understanding of whole-organism trade-offs that occur in reproducing individuals remain, particularly as it relates to the nuances associated with female reproduction. This volume of Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB) contains a series of papers that focus on reviewing trade-offs from the female-centered perspective of biology (i.

Sleep duration and perceptions of sleep quality in British Army recruits during basic training - an observational analysis.

Introduction: Sleep is critical to the health, wellbeing and performance of military personnel during basic training. This two-part study evaluated sleep-wake patterns and sleep disturbances in junior soldiers (JS) and infantry recruits in Autumn 2021 (study 1), and non-infantry recruits in spring 2022 (study 2).

Methods: During studies 1 and 2, validated wearable technology combined with a sleep diary was used to quantify sleep-wake indices, sleep disturbances and perceptions of sleep quality.

Leopard density and the ecological and anthropogenic factors influencing density in a mixed-use landscape in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Large carnivores face numerous threats, including habitat loss and fragmentation, direct killing, and prey depletion, leading to significant global range and population declines. Despite such threats, leopards (Panthera pardus) persist outside protected areas throughout most of their range, occupying diverse habitat types and land uses, including peri-urban and rural areas. Understanding of leopard population dynamics in mixed-use landscapes is limited, especially in South Africa, where the majority of leopard research has focused on protected areas.

Meager Milk: Lasting Consequences for Adult Daughters of Primiparous Mothers Among Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Among mammals, primipara who initiate reproduction before full maturity can be constrained in their maternal investment, both due to fewer somatic resources and tradeoffs between their own continued development and reproductive effort. Primipara are particularly limited in their capacity to synthesize milk during lactation, the costliest aspect of reproduction for most mammals, especially primates due to long periods of postnatal development. Due to reduced milk transfer, Firstborns may be at elevated risk for long-term consequences of deficits in early life endowment from their primiparous mothers.

Stress exposure histories revealed by biochemical changes along accentuated lines in teeth.

The regular incremental secretion of enamel and dentine can be interrupted during periods of stress resulting in accentuated growth lines. These accentuated lines, visible under light microscopy, provide a chronology of an individual's stress exposure. Previously, we showed that small biochemical changes along accentuated growth lines detected by Raman spectroscopy, coincided with the timing of medical history events and disruptions of weight trajectory in teeth from captive macaques.

Species Colonization in Infancy: A Global Cross-Sectional Comparison by Population History of Breastfeeding.

species are beneficial and dominant members of the breastfed infant gut microbiome; however, their health benefits are partially species-dependent. Here, we characterize the species and subspecies of in breastfed infants around the world to consider the potential impact of a historic dietary shift on the disappearance of subsp. in some populations.

Human Milk Oligosaccharide Compositions Illustrate Global Variations in Early Nutrition.

Background: Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are an abundant class of compounds found in human milk and have been linked to the development of the infant, and specifically the brain, immune system, and gut microbiome.

Objectives: Advanced analytical methods were used to obtain relative quantitation of many structures in approximately 2000 samples from over 1000 mothers in urban, semirural, and rural sites across geographically diverse countries.

Methods: LC-MS-based analytical methods were used to profile the compounds with broad structural coverage and quantitative information.

Inheritance of hormonal stress response and temperament in infant rhesus macaques (Macaca Mulatta): Nonadditive and sex-specific effects.

Objective: Early life interindividual variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) reactivity to stress is predictive of later life psychological and physical well-being, including the development of many pathological syndromes that are often sex-biased. A complex and interactive set of environmental and genetic causes for such variation has been implicated by previous studies, though little attention has been paid to nonadditive effects (e.g.

Integrative approaches to dispersing science: A case study of March Mammal Madness.

Objectives: Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholarship. For early career and established scholars, navigating the mosaic landscape of public education and science communication, noted for rapid "ecological" succession, can be daunting. Moreover, academics are characterized by diverse skills, motivations, values, positionalities, and temperaments that may differentially incline individuals to particular public translation activities.

March Mammal Madness and the power of narrative in science outreach.

March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach - gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products - to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature.

Wearable Devices Suitable for Monitoring Twenty Four Hour Heart Rate Variability in Military Populations.

Heart rate variability (HRV) measurements provide information on the autonomic nervous system and the balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic activity. A high HRV can be advantageous, reflecting the ability of the autonomic nervous system to adapt, whereas a low HRV can be indicative of fatigue, overtraining or health issues. There has been a surge in wearable devices that claim to measure HRV.

Altered Dynamic Postural Stability and Joint Position Sense Following British Army Foot-Drill.

Impaired proprioceptive acuity negatively affects both joint position sense and postural control and is a risk factor for lower-extremity musculoskeletal injury in athletes and military personnel. British Army foot-drill is an occupational military activity involving cyclical high impact loading forces greater than those observed in athletes during high level plyometrics. Foot-drill may contribute to the high rates of lower-extremity overuse injuries observed in recruits during basic training.

Measuring Protein Turnover in the Field: Implications for Military Research.

Protein turnover reflects the continual synthesis and breakdown of body proteins, and can be measured at a whole-body (i.e. aggregated across all body proteins) or tissue (e.

Inspiratory muscle training at sea level improves the strength of inspiratory muscles during load carriage in cold-hypoxia.

Inspiratory muscle training (IMT) and functional IMT (IMT: exercise-specific IMT activities) has been unsuccessful in reducing respiratory muscle fatigue following load carriage. IMT did not include load carriage specific exercises. Fifteen participants split into two groups (training and control) walked 6km loaded (18.

Mortality Outcomes of Vertebral Augmentation (Vertebroplasty and/or Balloon Kyphoplasty) for Osteoporotic Vertebral Compression Fractures: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Background Osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures (OVCFs) are prevalent, with associated morbidity and mortality. Vertebral augmentation (VA), defined as either vertebroplasty and/or balloon kyphoplasty (BKP), is a minimally invasive surgical treatment to reduce pain and further collapse and/or renew vertebral body height by introducing bone cement into fractured vertebrae. Nonsurgical management (NSM) for OVCF carries inherent risks.

Crucial Contributions : A Biocultural Study of Grandmothering During the Perinatal Period.

Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions.

Steroid hormone concentrations in milk predict sex-specific offspring growth in a nonhuman primate.

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 characteristics, and that changes in these hormones across lactation are associated with early postnatal growth rates.

Methods: Demographic information, morphometrics, and milk samples were collected from rhesus macaque mothers and their infants at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis, California.

Diversity and temporal dynamics of primate milk microbiomes.

Milk is inhabited by a community of bacteria and is one of the first postnatal sources of microbial exposure for mammalian young. Bacteria in breast milk may enhance immune development, improve intestinal health, and stimulate the gut-brain axis for infants. Variation in milk microbiome structure (e.

Variation among populations in the immune protein composition of mother's milk reflects subsistence pattern.

Lay Summary: Adaptive immune proteins in mothers' milk are more variable than innate immune proteins across populations and subsistence strategies. These results suggest that the immune defenses in milk are shaped by a mother's environment throughout her life.

Background And Objectives: Mother's milk contains immune proteins that play critical roles in protecting the infant from infection and priming the infant's developing immune system during early life.

Interaction Between Ambient Temperature, Hypoxia, and Load Carriage on Respiratory Muscle Fatigue.

While respiratory muscle fatigue is present following load carriage activity at sea level, the effect of environmental conditions on respiratory strength while undertaking load carriage is unknown. The effect of thoracic load carriage during walks (5.5 km) in four environments [(thermo-neutral sea level (SL), -10°C (C), 4300 m (H) and 4300 m at -10°C (HC)] was evaluated on respiratory muscle fatigue.

Rabbit relinquishment through online classified advertisements in the United Kingdom: when, why, and how many?

To identify implicit causes of companion rabbit relinquishment, this study investigated whether there was annual and seasonal variation in the number of advertisements and ages of rabbits posted as free or for sale on classified websites in the United Kingdom. The number of advertisements posted decreased from 2014 to 2016. There was an increase in the number of advertisements for free rabbits in winter compared with other seasons, which could be a result of caregivers' reduced willingness to interact with their rabbits and carry out husbandry during periods of inclement weather.

Age at reproductive debut: Developmental predictors and consequences for lactation, infant mass, and subsequent reproduction in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Objectives: The age at which females initiate their reproductive career is a critical life-history parameter with potential consequences on their residual reproductive value and lifetime fitness. The age at reproductive debut may be intimately tied to the somatic capacity of the mother to rear her young, but relatively little is known about the influence of age of first birth on milk synthesis within a broader framework of reproductive scheduling, infant outcomes, and other life-history tradeoffs.

Material And Methods: Our study investigated the predictors of age at first reproduction among 108 captive rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) females, and associations with their milk synthesis at peak lactation, infant mass, and ability to subsequently conceive and reproduce.