Abstract
Maternal effects are widely observed, but their adaptive nature remains difficult to describe and interpret. We investigated adaptive maternal effects in a clone of the crustacean Daphnia magna, experimentally varying both maternal age and maternal food and subsequently varying food available to offspring. We had two main predictions: that offspring in a food environment matched to their mothers should fare better than offspring in unmatched environments, and that offspring of older mothers would fare better in low food environments. We detected numerous maternal effects, for example offspring of poorly fed mothers were large, whereas offspring of older mothers were both large and showed an earlier age at first reproduction. However, these maternal effects did not clearly translate into the predicted differences in reproduction. Thus, our predictions about adaptive maternal effects in response to food variation were not met in this genotype of Daphnia magna.
Highlights
The environment, condition or phenotype of a mother can account for a significant amount of variation in the traits of her offspring (Wilson et al, 2005)
Theoretical studies have shown the strong potential of maternal effects to alter population dynamics (Ginzburgh, 1998) and population genetic structure (Wade, 1998; Wolf et al, 1998), and so the evolutionary potential of a population (Kuijper & Hoyle, 2015)
This study used a single clone of D. magna collected from the Kaimes population in the borders of Scotland that has been the subject of numerous maternal effects investigations (see (Mitchell & Read, 2005; Stjernman & Little, 2011; Garbutt & Little, 2014; Clark et al, 2017)
Summary
The environment, condition or phenotype of a mother can account for a significant amount of variation in the traits of her offspring (Wilson et al, 2005). Such maternal effects are known for immunity (Coakley et al, 2014), variation in feeding rate (Garbutt & Little, 2014), anti-predator behaviour (Agrawal et al, 1999) and dispersal traits (Dingle, 2014), among others. It is hypothesized that maternal effects are a successful adaptive strategy in variable, but predictable environments.
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