By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: January 3, 2011
Ministers of the Lutheran Church in 18th-century Finland kept careful records of births, deaths and marriages so they could efficiently tax their congregants, but 21st-century biologists are using the data for quite a different purpose.
More Vital Signs ColumnsMatching up birth records with yearly crop yields, they conclude that poor children born in years with good harvests were more likely to go on to have children themselves.
“These results suggest that food in early life can affect fertility in a human population,” said the lead researcher, Ian J. Rickard, a research fellow at the University of Sheffield in England.
The study (>> http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/10-0019.1), published in the December issue of Ecology, found a strong correlation between fertility and social class. For children born to landowners, the chance of reproducing remained steady at about 80 percent, unaffected by variations in the yearly grain harvest.
But 95 percent of landless women born the year of a bumper crop had babies later, while only 56 percent of those born the year of a poor harvest reproduced as adults.
Dr. Rickard cautioned that the finding was specific to a time and place with a fairly rigid social structure. The strong link between early deprivation and infertility later on, he said, “is unlikely to be the case in modern industrialized societies where the availability of calories is not the issue.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 4, 2011, on page D6 of the New York edition.
The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, issued quarterly, contains announcements of meetings of the Society and related organizations, programs, awards, articles, and items of current interest to members.
