Abstract
Good early nutritional conditions may confer a lasting fitness advantage over individuals suffering poor early conditions (a ‘silver spoon’ effect). Alternatively, if early conditions predict the likely adult environment, adaptive plastic responses might maximize individual performance when developmental and adult conditions match (environmental-matching effect). Here, we test for silver spoon and environmental-matching effects by manipulating the early nutritional environment of Nicrophorus vespilloides burying beetles. We manipulated nutrition during two specific early developmental windows: the larval environment and the post-eclosion environment. We then tested contest success in relation to variation in adult social environmental quality experienced (defined according to whether contest opponents were smaller (good environment) or larger (poor environment) than the focal individual). Variation in the larval environment influenced adult body size but not contest success per se for a given adult social environment experienced (an ‘indirect’ silver spoon effect). Variation in post-eclosion environment affected contest success dependent on the quality of the adult environment experienced (a context-dependent ‘direct’ silver spoon effect). By contrast, there was no evidence for environmental-matching. The results demonstrate the importance of social environmental context in determining how variation in nutrition in early life affects success as an adult.
Highlights
Variation in nutrition experienced by individuals during development can have long-term effects on adult phenotype, such as body mass [1], fecundity [2], dominance status [3] and longevity [4] that directly affect the fitness of individuals
We found a significant interaction between the post-eclosion nutritional environment experienced during development and adult social environment predicted the probability of success in contests: the steeper slope relationship of beetles that experienced poor post-eclosion nutrition indicates that they had a lower probability of winning contests across adult social environments than did beetles that experienced good post-eclosion nutrition, except when they were substantially larger than their opponents
Instead results showed that benefits of good nutrition during development depended on the adult social environment individuals experienced
Summary
Variation in nutrition experienced by individuals during development can have long-term effects on adult phenotype, such as body mass [1], fecundity [2], dominance status [3] and longevity [4] that directly affect the fitness of individuals. Burying beetles feed on putrescent carrion and various invertebrates so variation in food availability in the wild is likely to occur because of rainfall and temperature fluctuations affecting beetle (and potential prey) activity, and through stochastic availability of carrion This post-eclosion nutritional bottleneck is not the only window during which variation in nutrition may have long-term effects on adult traits; the social and nutritional environment experienced during larval development is important [30]. In contrast to most previous studies that treat early development as a single, largely homogeneous juvenile stage, we independently manipulated larval and post-eclosion pre-reproductive nutritional windows This is because good nutrition during the first (larval) window, if considered alone, might produce relatively large adults endowed with a putative silver spoon competitive advantage in proportion to their relative size, independent of later environmental conditions.
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