Adaptive Maternal Investment in the Wild? Links between Maternal Growth Trajectory and Offspring Size, Growth, and Survival in Contrasting Environments.

Adaptive Maternal Investment in the Wild? Links between Maternal Growth Trajectory and Offspring Size, Growth, and Survival in Contrasting Environments. Am Nat. 2020 Apr;195(4):678-690 Authors: Burton T, Rollinson N, McKelvey S, Stewart DC, Armstrong JD, Metcalfe NB Abstract Life-history theory predicts that investment per offspring should correlate negatively with the quality of the environment that offspring are anticipated to encounter; parents may use their own experience as juveniles to predict this environment and may modulate offspring traits, such as growth capacity and initial size. We manipulated nutrient levels in the juvenile habitat of wild Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) to investigate the hypothesis that the egg size that maximizes juvenile growth and survival depends on environmental quality. We also tested whether offspring traits were related to parental growth trajectory. Mothers that grew fast when young produced more offspring and smaller offspring than mothers that grew slowly to reach the same size. Despite their size disadvantage, offspring of faster-growing mothers grew faster than those of slower-growing mothers in all environments, counter to the expectation that they would be competitively disadvantaged. However, they had lower relative survival in environments where the density of older predatory/competitor fish was relatively high. These links between maternal (but not paternal) growth trajectory and offsp...
Source: The American Naturalist - Category: Biology Authors: Tags: Am Nat Source Type: research