Maternal effects on offspring consumption can stabilize fluctuating predator–prey systems

Abstract

Maternal effects, where the conditions experienced by mothers affect the phenotype of their offspring, are widespread in nature and have the potential to influence population dynamics. However, they are very rarely included in models of population dynamics. Here, we investigate a recently discovered maternal effect, where maternal food availability affects the feeding rate of offspring so that well-fed mothers produce fast-feeding offspring.To understand how this maternal effect influences population dynamics, we explore novel predator -prey models where the consumption rate of predators is modified by changes in maternal prey availability. We address the 'paradox of enrichment', a theoretical prediction that nutrient enrichment destabilizes populations, leading to cycling behaviour and an increased risk of extinction, which has proved difficult to confirm in the wild. Our models show that enriched populations can be stabilized by maternal effects on feeding rate, thus presenting an intriguing potential explanation for the general absence of 'paradox of enrichment' behaviour in natural populations. This stabilizing influence should also reduce a population's risk of extinction and vulnerability to harvesting.

Roles of maternal effects in maintaining genetic variation: Maternal storage effect

“…Our results indicated that maternal effects stabilize oscillatory dynamics, but previous studies have found that maternal selection can destabilize allele frequency dynamics in population genetic models (Gavrilets 1998;Spencer et al 2006;Van Cleve and Feldman 2008). Similarly, ecological studies have revealed that maternal effects can stabilize (Garbutt et al 2015) or destabilize (Ginzburg and Taneyhill 1994) population dynamics in prey-predator models. Maternal effects cause time lags in frequency changes of adaptive phenotypes in response to selection (Wright 1969;Kirkpatrick and Lande 1989;Lande and Kirkpatrick 1990;Nagylaki 1992), and we suppose these time delays might become either a stabilizing or a destabilizing factor, depending on the details of the models.…”

“…Similarly, ecological studies have revealed that maternal effects can stabilize (Garbutt et al. ) or destabilize (Ginzburg and Taneyhill ) population dynamics in prey–predator models. Maternal effects cause time lags in frequency changes of adaptive phenotypes in response to selection (Wright ; Kirkpatrick and Lande ; Lande and Kirkpatrick ; Nagylaki ), and we suppose these time delays might become either a stabilizing or a destabilizing factor, depending on the details of the models.…”

“…Because both the storage effect and maternal effects are important in community ecology (e.g., Chesson and Warner 1981;Ginzburg and Taneyhill 1994;Garbutt et al 2015), the maternal storage effect may facilitate species coexistence in fluctuating environments. In the case of species coexistence, environmentally-based (nongenetic) maternal effects, in which maternal environments affect offspring phenotypes (e.g., transgenerational phenotypic plasticity: Agrawal et al 1999), cause the genotype-phenotype mismatches and temporal storage effects.…”

Paternal care effects outweigh gamete-mediated and personal environment effects during the transgenerational estimation of risk in fathead minnows

“…Transgenerational plasticity, which evolves only when environmental change is slower than generation time [ 8 ], or when future environmental change can be accurately predicted [ 9 ], is widespread [ 10 ]. Due to its relevance in allowing organisms to cope with climate change [ 11 , 12 ], and in reducing populations’ extinction risk in a changing world [ 13 ], researchers have been pushing for a better understanding of this phenomenon [ 10 , 12 ].…”