Abstract
Variation in environmental conditions during development can lead to changes in life-history traits with long-lasting effects. Here, we study how variation in temperature and host plant (i.e. the consequences of potential maternal oviposition choices) affects a suite of life-history traits in pre-diapause larvae of the Glanville fritillary butterfly. We focus on offspring survival, larval growth rates and relative fat reserves, and pay specific attention to intraspecific variation in the responses (G × E × E). Globally, thermal performance and survival curves varied between diets of two host plants, suggesting that host modifies the temperature impact, or vice versa. Additionally, we show that the relative fat content has a host-dependent, discontinuous response to developmental temperature. This implies that a potential switch in resource allocation, from more investment in growth at lower temperatures to storage at higher temperatures, is dependent on the larval diet. Interestingly, a large proportion of the variance in larval performance is explained by differences among families, or interactions with this variable. Finally, we demonstrate that these family-specific responses to the host plant remain largely consistent across thermal environments. Together, the results of our study underscore the importance of paying attention to intraspecific trait variation in the field of evolutionary ecology.
Highlights
Species can cope with environmental change by avoiding stressful conditions, by producing phenotypes better adjusted to the new environmental conditions through plasticity, or by adapting to the novel conditions through evolutionary change [1,2]
Using a full-factorial design, with fourteen genetic backgrounds, four developmental temperatures and two host plant species, we explored the relative contributions of different sources of phenotypic variance across a suite of life-history traits in the Glanville fritillary butterfly
When immature life-stages are largely immobile, such as in the case of the Glanville fritillary butterfly, the optimal thermal environment for development can be realized through selective oviposition choices of the 5 female
Summary
Species can cope with environmental change by avoiding stressful conditions, by producing phenotypes better adjusted to the new environmental conditions through plasticity, or by adapting to the novel conditions through evolutionary change [1,2]. Developmental plasticity is defined as the process through which external conditions, such as nutrition and temperature, can influence developmental trajectories and lead to irreversible changes in the adult phenotype [1]. This phenomenon is ubiquitous in nature, especially among taxa that have sessile lifestyles [6,7,8]. Significant genetic variation for (multidimensional) plasticity is known to exist in both natural and laboratory populations [20,21,22] This intraspecific variation in the ability to respond to an environmental cue (G × E), or combinations of cues (G × E × E), is hypothesized to be beneficial in the context of climate change since it facilitates the evolution of wider ranges of environmental tolerance [23,24]. Given that the natural habitat of this species is heterogeneous, fragmented and highly variable we expect family-specific responses to the environmental factors (G × E, G × E × E) to be important determinants of the phenotype
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