Nongenetic inheritance of behavioural variability is context specific and sex specific

Abstract

1. Environmentally mediated nongenetic inheritance extends the concept of phenotypic plasticity across generations, allowing for the experience of parents to influence the physiology, life history and behaviour of their offspring.2. We assess whether the perceived social environment of mothers and fathers impacts offspring behaviour in the Australian field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus.3. We varied parents' perception of the density of conspecific males by exposing parents to either the presence or absence of male song throughout rearing. Following mating in a factorial design, the offspring of the parental pairs were also reared across the two acoustic environments and their behaviour assessed as adults.4. When reared in a no-song environment, offspring of both sexes were more active, emerging from a shelter sooner and displaying greater mobility in search of male song. 5. Offspring behaviour was not directly impacted by either the maternal or paternal social environments independently, but there was a significant interaction effect between the parental environments on the behaviour of daughters. When both parents were reared in song ('paternal song × maternal song'), their no-song-reared daughters exhibited lower levels of mobility than the no-song-reared daughters of 'paternal song × maternal no-song' and 'paternal no-song × maternal song' pairs. 6. Although our data suggest that nongenetic parental effects may have the potential to drive behavioural variability in offspring, such effects are highly complex, only arising as sex-and context-specific traits.

Evolutionary consequences of pesticide exposure include transgenerational plasticity and potential terminal investment transgenerational effects

“…Inter-and transgenerational effects were thus sex specific as the resulting phenotype/life history of the offspring differed depending on whether the father or the mother got exposed. Notably, although most studies documenting sex-specific cross-generational plasticity focus on intergenerational plasticity (e.g., see Garcia-Gonzalez and Dowling 2015;Hellmann et al 2020;Moschilla et al 2022), our results extend these findings to transgenerational scenarios.…”

Within-generation and transgenerational social plasticity interact during rapid adaptive evolution

“…), but are consistent with other findings that suggest increases in exploratory behavior under predation risk (Moschilla et al 2021).…”

“…Like many insect species, T. oceanicus suffers high juvenile mortality, favoring fitness-increasing alterations to early juvenile phenotype via TGP. Recent findings suggest that nongenetic inheritance can affect the interplay between predation risk vs. movement towards singing males, though this has only been examined for adults (Moschilla et al 2021). Second, the fragmented distribution of T. oceanicus habitat in Hawaii, the inability of juveniles to fly, and overlapping generations should result in high autocorrelation between parental and offspring social environments, which is predicted to favor adaptive TGP (Leimar and McNamara 2015).…”

Male responses to sperm competition risk associated with increased macronutrient intake and reduced lifespan

“…Crickets were split equally across two competitive environments, one in which they were exposed to the acoustic sexual signals of rival males (song = 38) and the other a non-competitive silent environment (silence = 38). Manipulation of the competitive environment followed established protocols [ 31 , 32 ], details of which can be found in the electronic supplementary material. Crickets were checked daily, and the date on which they moulted to the 9th (penultimate) instar, and the date they moulted to an adult were noted.…”