Abstract
Both developmental nutrition and adult nutrition affect life-history traits; however, little is known about whether the effect of developmental nutrition depends on the adult environment experienced. We used the fruit fly to determine whether life-history traits, particularly life span and fecundity, are affected by developmental nutrition, and whether this depends on the extent to which the adult environment allows females to realize their full reproductive potential. We raised flies on three different developmental food levels containing increasing amounts of yeast and sugar: poor, control, and rich. We found that development on poor or rich larval food resulted in several life-history phenotypes indicative of suboptimal conditions, including increased developmental time, and, for poor food, decreased adult weight. However, development on poor larval food actually increased adult virgin life span. In addition, we manipulated the reproductive potential of the adult environment by adding yeast or yeast and a male. This manipulation interacted with larval food to determine adult fecundity. Specifically, under two adult conditions, flies raised on poor larval food had higher reproduction at certain ages – when singly mated this occurred early in life and when continuously mated with yeast this occurred during midlife. We show that poor larval food is not necessarily detrimental to key adult life-history traits, but does exert an adult environment-dependent effect, especially by affecting virgin life span and altering adult patterns of reproductive investment. Our findings are relevant because (1) they may explain differences between published studies on nutritional effects on life-history traits; (2) they indicate that optimal nutritional conditions are likely to be different for larvae and adults, potentially reflecting evolutionary history; and (3) they urge for the incorporation of developmental nutritional conditions into the central life-history concept of resource acquisition and allocation.
Highlights
Nutrition is a primary determinant of life span, the rate of aging, and reproductive capacity (Weindruch and Walford 1982; Chippindale et al 1993; Good and Tatar 2001; Walker et al 2005; Fontana et al 2010), and as such, its relationship to life history has been studied extensively
While for the larvae raised on rich media, the delay was only about 8 h, larvae on poor food took 34 h longer to develop on average (Fig. 2A)
Larval weight at 4 days after hatching was strongly affected by larval food level (ANOVA: F2,42 = 56.6690, P < 0.0001 and F2,42 = 59.4345, P < 0.0001 for wet and dry weights, respectively, Fig. 2B). Both poor food and rich food raised larvae were lighter than control larvae (Tukey HSD: P < 0.001 for poor and rich raised larvae, respectively, Fig. 2B); the effect was much stronger on poor food raised larvae, which were 65% lighter than controls
Summary
Nutrition is a primary determinant of life span, the rate of aging, and reproductive capacity (Weindruch and Walford 1982; Chippindale et al 1993; Good and Tatar 2001; Walker et al 2005; Fontana et al 2010), and as such, its relationship to life history has been studied extensively. The discovery of life span extension upon dietary restriction across many different animal species has resulted in a booming field concerned with characterizing the mechanism and specific nutrient dependencies of the effect (Weindruch and Walford 1982; Austad 1989; Chippindale et al 1993; Grandison et al 2009). Twenty-five years ago, Barker et al (1989) found that human infants with low birth weights had higher adult mortality from cardiovascular disease. In this case, low birth weight was regarded as a proxy for malnutrition in a 2015 The Authors.
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