Abstract
Theory maintains that when future environment is predictable, parents should adjust the phenotype of their offspring to match the anticipated environment. The plausibility of positive anticipatory parental effects is hotly debated and the experimental evidence for the evolution of such effects is currently lacking. We experimentally investigated the evolution of anticipatory maternal effects in a range of environments that differ drastically in how predictable they are. Populations of the nematode Caenorhabditis remanei, adapted to 20°C, were exposed to a novel temperature (25°C) for 30 generations with either positive or zero correlation between parent and offspring environment. We found that populations evolving in novel environments that were predictable across generations evolved a positive anticipatory maternal effect, because they required maternal exposure to 25°C to achieve maximum reproduction in that temperature. In contrast, populations evolving under zero environmental correlation had lost this anticipatory maternal effect. Similar but weaker patterns were found if instead rate‐sensitive population growth was used as a fitness measure. These findings demonstrate that anticipatory parental effects evolve in response to environmental change so that ill‐fitting parental effects can be rapidly lost. Evolution of positive anticipatory parental effects can aid population viability in rapidly changing but predictable environments.
Highlights
For fitness in 25°C, we found a significant experimental evolution regime × parental temperature interaction (Regime: F3, 20.2 = 0.493, P = 0.691; Parental temperature: F1, 18.9 = 0.135, P = 0.718; Regime × Parental temperature: F3, 18.7 = 4.249, P = 0.019)
This interaction was caused by significantly opposite slope for Fast temperature cycles compared to Increased warming, with highest fitness in 25°C for Fast temperature cycles when parents were grown in 20°C, whereas highest fitness in 25°C for Increased warming was achieved when their parents were grown in 25°C
The planned post hoc comparisons showed that there was no effect of parental exposure to 25°C for Fast temperature cycles, whereas all other regimes had higher total reproduction in 25°C if parents were exposed to 25°C (Fig. 2B; Tables S3 and S4)
Summary
Theory predicts that positive transgenerational correlations would result in the evolution of a positive parental effect and, importantly, if the environmental state is uncorrelated and unpredictable across generations, parental effects would be maladaptive and selected against (Lachmann and Jablonka 1996; Kuijper and Hoyle 2015; Leimar and McNamara 2015; Uller et al 2015) The latter is considered a reason why adaptive parental effects are generally weak (Uller et al 2013). We found positive anticipatory maternal effects on reproduction in populations evolving in environments
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