Is corticosterone-mediated phenotype development adaptive? Maternal corticosterone treatment enhances survival in male lizards

Meylan, Sandrine; Clobert, Jean

doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2004.11.022

Cited by 124 publications

(128 citation statements)

References 52 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

117

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Such a pattern was detected in the cliff swallow (Pterochelidon pyrrhonota); individuals with low or high values for corticosterone experienced the lowest survival, whereas intermediate values corresponded with higher survival [148]. The relationship between corticosterone and fitness may also vary within a study, depending on the sex of the individual [149,150] and the measure of fitness [146,149]. The inconsistency of these results with the corticosteronefitness hypothesis may result in part from variation in the association between corticosterone and components of fitness across life-history stages and environmental contexts [145].…”

Section: Hormonal Effects On Components Of Fitnessmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…In reptiles, the effects of prenatal exposure to corticosterone may affect size, body condition, growth and sex determination [150,[184][185][186]. In most cases, these corticosterone-mediated morphological changes seem deleterious; the decrease of body condition observed can be caused by impairing immune system function and mobilization of energy stores [187].…”

Section: Hormones and Maternal Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Hormonally mediated maternal effects, individual strategy and global change

Meylan¹,

Miles

Clobert

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A challenge to ecologists and evolutionary biologists is predicting organismal responses to the anticipated changes to global ecosystems through climate change. Most evidence suggests that short-term global change may involve increasing occurrences of extreme events, therefore the immediate response of individuals will be determined by physiological capacities and life-history adaptations to cope with extreme environmental conditions. Here, we consider the role of hormones and maternal effects in determining the persistence of species in altered environments. Hormones, specifically steroids, are critical for patterning the behaviour and morphology of parents and their offspring. Hence, steroids have a pervasive influence on multiple aspects of the offspring phenotype over its lifespan. Stress hormones, e.g. glucocorticoids, modulate and perturb phenotypes both early in development and later into adulthood. Females exposed to abiotic stressors during reproduction may alter the phenotypes by manipulation of hormones to the embryos. Thus, hormone-mediated maternal effects, which generate phenotypic plasticity, may be one avenue for coping with global change. Variation in exposure to hormones during development influences both the propensity to disperse, which alters metapopulation dynamics, and population dynamics, by affecting either recruitment to the population or subsequent life-history characteristics of the offspring. We suggest that hormones may be an informative index to the potential for populations to adapt to changing environments.

show abstract

Section: Hormonal Effects On Components Of Fitnessmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Hormones and Maternal Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hormonally mediated maternal effects, individual strategy and global change

Meylan¹,

Miles

Clobert

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In species where there is disparity in the proximate or ultimate costs of raising a given sex, our framework predicts that the more expensive sex would have a lower threshold to respond to maternal stress given that the costs of errors would be higher compared to the less expensive sex (Love & Williams, 2008; Love et al., 2005). Likewise, in species with sex‐biased natal dispersal, our framework would predict that the dispersing sex should have a higher threshold to respond to maternal stress compared to the philopatric sex, given the reliability of the information about the future environment is lower in the dispersing sex (de Fraipont et al., 2000; Meylan & Clobert, 2005). This idea can be expanded to species with natal dispersal in general, and interestingly, to natal habitat preference induction, where dispersing individuals will select habitats that are most similar to their natal habitat (Davis & Stamps, 2004).…”

Section: Predicting the Relative Strength Of Vertebrate Maternal‐strementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This circumstance is analogous to a situation where cues that once induced adaptive phenotypic plasticity now become unreliable (Trimmer, Ehlman, & Sih, 2017). For example, consider animals such as common lizards ( Zootoca vivipara ) in which maternal stress increases offspring propensity to disperse as an adaptive response to increasing predation risk (Bestion et al., 2015; Meylan & Clobert, 2005). If such animals now face a novel anthropogenic stimulus (e.g., traffic noise) that also induces maternal stress, the resultant offspring phenotype may exhibit a false‐positive error (since the stressor was not predation risk), and the cost of this error may now decrease (rather than increase) offspring fitness.…”

Section: Maladaptive Errors In Response To Novel Stressorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The consequences of maternal stress have long been considered to be maladaptive in biomedical fields because offspring phenotypes that can occur in response to maternal stress (e.g., smaller size, slower growth, lower energetic demand, higher anxiety‐like behavior) are assumed to confer reduced fitness (Sheriff & Love, 2013). However, researchers have recently proposed that maternal stress can play adaptive roles across a wide variety of animal taxa if stress‐induced phenotypes better prepare offspring for a stressful postnatal environment in mammals (Bian et al., 2015; Dantzer et al., 2013; Sheriff, 2015; Sheriff, Krebs, & Boonstra, 2010), birds (Chin et al., 2009; Coslovsky & Richner, 2011; Love, Chin, Wynne‐Edwards, & Williams, 2005; Love & Williams, 2008), reptiles (Bestion, Clobert, & Cote, 2015; de Fraipont, Clobert, John‐Adler, & Meylan, 2000; Meylan & Clobert, 2005), and fish (Giesing, Suski, Warner, & Bell, 2011). Despite this recent progress, a unified framework that both explains the selective mechanisms and allows field‐testing of the adaptive role of maternal stress has yet to be proposed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Error management theory and the adaptive significance of transgenerational maternal‐stress effects on offspring phenotype

Sheriff

Dantzer

Love

et al. 2018

Ecology and Evolution

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is well established that circulating maternal stress hormones (glucocorticoids, GCs) can alter offspring phenotype. There is also a growing body of empirical work, within ecology and evolution, indicating that maternal GCs link the environment experienced by the mother during gestation with changes in offspring phenotype. These changes are considered to be adaptive if the maternal environment matches the offspring's environment and maladaptive if it does not. While these ideas are conceptually sound, we lack a testable framework that can be used to investigate the fitness costs and benefits of altered offspring phenotypes across relevant future environments. We present error management theory as the foundation for a framework that can be used to assess the adaptive potential of maternal stress hormones on offspring phenotype across relevant postnatal scenarios. To encourage rigorous testing of our framework, we provide field‐testable hypotheses regarding the potential adaptive role of maternal stress across a diverse array of taxa and life histories, as well as suggestions regarding how our framework might provide insight into past, present, and future research. This perspective provides an informed lens through which to design and interpret experiments on the effects of maternal stress, provides a framework for predicting and testing variation in maternal stress across and within taxa, and also highlights how rapid environmental change that induces maternal stress may lead to evolutionary traps.

show abstract

Measuring Selection on Physiology in the Wild and Manipulating Phenotypes (in Terrestrial Nonhuman Vertebrates)

Husak

2015

Comprehensive Physiology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

To understand why organisms function the way that they do, we must understand how evolution shapes physiology. This requires knowledge of how selection acts on physiological traits in nature. Selection studies in the wild allow us to determine how variation in physiology causes variation in fitness, revealing how evolution molds physiology over evolutionary time. Manipulating phenotypes experimentally in a selection study shifts the distribution of trait variation in a population to better explore potential constraints and the adaptive value of physiological traits. There is a large database of selection studies in the wild on a variety of traits, but very few of those are physiological traits. Nevertheless, data available so far suggest that physiological traits, including metabolic rate, thermal physiology, whole-organism performance, and hormone levels, are commonly subjected to directional selection in nature, with stabilizing and disruptive selection less common than predicted if physiological traits are optimized to an environment. Selection studies on manipulated phenotypes, including circulating testosterone and glucocorticoid levels, reinforce this notion, but reveal that trade-offs between survival and reproduction or correlational selection can constrain the evolution of physiology. More studies of selection on physiological traits in nature that quantify multiple traits are necessary to better determine the manner in which physiological traits evolve and whether different types of traits (dynamic performance vs. regulatory) evolve differently.

show abstract

Is corticosterone-mediated phenotype development adaptive? Maternal corticosterone treatment enhances survival in male lizards

Cited by 124 publications

References 52 publications

Hormonally mediated maternal effects, individual strategy and global change

Hormonally mediated maternal effects, individual strategy and global change

Error management theory and the adaptive significance of transgenerational maternal‐stress effects on offspring phenotype

Measuring Selection on Physiology in the Wild and Manipulating Phenotypes (in Terrestrial Nonhuman Vertebrates)

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About