PARENTING AND SURVIVAL IN ANTHROPOID PRIMATES - CARETAKERS LIVE LONGER

Most anthropoid primates are slow to develop, their offspring are most ly single births, and the interbirth intervals are long. To maintain a stable population, parents must live long enough to sustain the seria l production of a sufficient number of young to replace themselves whi le allowing for the death of offspring before they can reproduce. Howe ver, iii many species there is a large differential between the sexes in the care provided to offspring. Therefore, we hypothesize that in s lowly developing species with single births, the sex that bears the gr eater burden in the care of offspring will tend to survive longer. Mal es are incapable of gestating infants and lactating, but in several sp ecies fathers carry their offspring for long periods. We predict that females tend to live longer than males in the species where the mother does most or all of the care of offspring, that there is no differenc e in survival between the sexes in species in which both parents parti cipate about equally in infant care, and that in the species where the father does a greater amount of care than the mother, males tend to l ive longer. The hypothesis is supported by survival data for males and females in anthropoid primate species.