Abstract
Parents adjust their reproductive investment over their lifespan based on their condition, age, and social environment, creating the potential for inter-generational effects to differentially affect offspring physiology.To date, however, little is known about how social environments experienced by parents throughout development and adulthood influence the effect of parental age on the expression of life-history traits in the offspring. Here, I collected data on Drosophila melanogaster offspring traits (i.e., body weight, water content, and lipid reserves) from populations where either mothers, fathers both, or neither parents experienced different social environments during development (larval crowding) and adulthood. Parental treatment modulated parental age effects on offspring lipid reserves but did not influence parental age effects on offspring water content. Importantly, parents in social environments where all individuals were raised in uncrowded larval densities produced daughters and sons lighter than parental treatments which produced the heaviest offspring. The peak in offspring body weight was delayed relative to the peak in parental reproductive success, but more strongly so for daughters from parental treatments where some or all males in the parental social environments were raised in crowded larval densities (irrespective of their social context), suggesting a potential father-to-daughter effect. Overall, the findings of this study reveal that parental ecological history (here, developmental and adult social environments) can modulate the effects of parental age at reproduction on the expression of offspring traits.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 391-399 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Current Zoology |
Volume | 68 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 4 Oct 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Aug 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:J.M. held a CNPq Science Without Borders PhD Scholarship during the time in which the first experiments were performed. J.M. now holds an independent fellowship which allowed him to complete the offspring physiological experiments described in this paper. The author would like to thank Dr Stuart Wigby, Dr Zhi-Yun Jia, Dr Mathieu Videlier, and two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments to improve the readability of the manuscript.
Data Availability Statement
Data Accessibility StatementRaw data are available in Supplementary Table S2. R script with code is provided as supplementary material.
Supplementary Material
Supplementary material can be found at https://academic.oup.com/cz
Keywords
- indirect fitness
- life-history
- maternal effects
- paternal effects