Abstract
For most mammals, motherhood is an important investment. This is especially true among humans. While the ultimate rewards can include increased reproductive fitness, motherhood is costly to females, in ways that conspecific males do not experience. At the same time, gestation and lactation provide a time during which maternal care translates into offspring survival, growth, and development. Offspring also benefit from maternal investments, by taking cues from their mother as a forecast of the environment into which they will be born. This allows offspring to adaptively, facultatively, respond to the environment by way of their mother. In this chapter, we use an evolutionary biological perspective to briefly review mammalian maternal effects on offspring development. Maternal effects on offspring start in utero during fetal development and continue through adulthood.
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