Abstract
There is a growing interest in predicting the social and ecological contexts that favor the evolution of maternal effects. Most predictions focus, however, on maternal effects that affect only a single character, whereas the evolution of maternal effects is poorly understood in the presence of suites of interacting traits. To overcome this, we simulate the evolution of multivariate maternal effects (captured by the matrix M) in a fluctuating environment. We find that the rate of environmental fluctuations has a substantial effect on the properties of M: in slowly changing environments, offspring are selected to have a multivariate phenotype roughly similar to the maternal phenotype, so that M is characterized by positive dominant eigenvalues; by contrast, rapidly changing environments favor Ms with dominant eigenvalues that are negative, as offspring favor a phenotype which substantially differs from the maternal phenotype. Moreover, when fluctuating selection on one maternal character is temporally delayed relative to selection on other traits, we find a striking pattern of cross-trait maternal effects in which maternal characters influence not only the same character in offspring, but also other offspring characters. Additionally, when selection on one character contains more stochastic noise relative to selection on other traits, large cross-trait maternal effects evolve from those maternal traits that experience the smallest amounts of noise. The presence of these cross-trait maternal effects shows that individual maternal effects cannot be studied in isolation, and that their study in a multivariate context may provide important insights about the nature of past selection. Our results call for more studies that measure multivariate maternal effects in wild populations.
Highlights
Since selection often varies both over space and time [1,2,3], evolutionary mechanisms that increase adaptation to changing environments are considered to be highly advantageous [4,5]
When nongenetic effects are present in a population, an individual’s phenotype becomes a function of the phenotypes of its parents or previous ancestors, giving rise to a form of transgenerational plasticity that is suggested to allow for increased flexibility when coping with environmental change [20,21,22]
We show that maternal phenotypic characters generally give rise to developmental interactions in which one maternal character affects multiple offspring characters
Summary
Since selection often varies both over space and time [1,2,3], evolutionary mechanisms that increase adaptation to changing environments are considered to be highly advantageous [4,5]. A growing number of recent studies suggest that nongenetic effects provide an additional way of adaptation to changing environments [12,13,14]. Nongenetic effects refer to any effect on the offspring phenotype that is brought about by the transmission of factors (other than sequences of DNA) from parents or more remote ancestors to the offspring [13,15]. When nongenetic effects are present in a population, an individual’s phenotype becomes a function of the phenotypes (or the environment) of its parents or previous ancestors, giving rise to a form of transgenerational plasticity that is suggested to allow for increased flexibility when coping with environmental change [20,21,22]
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