Egg‐laying environment modulates offspring responses to predation risk in an amphibian

Abstract

Predator-induced plasticity has been in the focus of evolutionary ecological research in the last decades, but the consequences of temporal variation in the presence of cues predicting offspring environment have remained controversial. This is partly due to the fact that the role of early environmental effects has scarcely been scrutinized in this context while also controlling for potential maternal effects. In this study, we investigated how past environmental conditions, that is different combinations of risky or safe adult (prenatal) and oviposition (early post-natal) environments, affected offspring's plastic responses in hatching time and locomotor activity to predation risk during development in the smooth newt (Lissotriton vulgaris). We found that females did not adjust their reproductive investment to the perceived level of risk in the adult environment, and this prenatal environment had generally negligible effect on offspring phenotype. However, when predator cues were absent during oviposition, larvae raised in the presence of predator cues delayed their hatching and exhibited a decreased activity compared to control larvae developing without predator cues, which responses are advantageous when predators pose a threat to hatched larvae. In the presence of predator cues during oviposition, the difference in hatching time persisted, but the difference in general locomotor activity disappeared between risk-exposed and control larvae. Our findings provide clear experimental evidence that fine-scale temporal variation in a predictive cue during and after egg-laying interactively affects offspring phenotype, and highlight the importance of the early post-natal environment, which may exert a substantial influence on progeny's phenotype also under natural conditions.

Phenotypic Switching Resulting From Developmental Plasticity: Fixed or Reversible?

“…Yet, the problem with this reversible/correctable semantic conundrum is that the term 'correctable' suggests that the modified phenotype resulting from developmental plasticity is actually sub-optimal (i.e., needs to be 'corrected'). In fact, the modified phenotype emerging from (enabled by) developmental plasticity might, of course, actually be advantageous under current environmental conditions -e.g., Toth and Hettyey (2018); Bautista and Burggren (2019), and Mendez-Sanchez and Burggren (2019). Not being able to resolve this issue here, this essay will nonetheless use the commonly acceptable term reversible with a parenthetical inclusion of correctable to remind the reader of the complexity of developmental plasticity.…”

Parents know best: transgenerational predator recognition through parental effects

“…Using a combination of mechanisms for recognising predatory threats may be important in life stages and environments with a high risk of predation. As such, when considering the impact predators have on offspring success and population dynamics, a combination of factors, namely parental effects, offspring's own experiences and phenotypes, and genetics, all need to be taken into account (Stratmann & Taborsky, 2014;Donelan & Trussell, 2018;Tóth & Hettyey, 2018).…”