Publication Date:
2014-12-17
Description:
Nongenetic inheritance mechanisms such as transgenerational plasticity
(TGP) can buffer populations against rapid environmental change such as
ocean warming. Yet, little is known about how long these effects persist and
whether they are cumulative over generations. Here, we tested for adaptive
TGP in response to simulated ocean warming across parental and grandparental
generations of marine sticklebacks. Grandparents were acclimated
for two months during reproductive conditioning, whereas parents experienced
developmental acclimation, allowing us to compare the fitness consequences
of short-term vs. prolonged exposure to elevated temperature
across multiple generations. We found that reproductive output of F1 adults
was primarily determined by maternal developmental temperature, but
carry-over effects from grandparental acclimation environments resulted in
cumulative negative effects of elevated temperature on hatching success. In
very early stages of growth, F2 offspring reached larger sizes in their respective
paternal and grandparental environment down the paternal line, suggesting
that other factors than just the paternal genome may be transferred
between generations. In later growth stages, maternal and maternal granddam
environments strongly influenced offspring body size, but in opposing
directions, indicating that the mechanism(s) underlying the transfer of environmental
information may have differed between acute and developmental
acclimation experienced by the two generations. Taken together, our results
suggest that the fitness consequences of parental and grandparental TGP are
highly context dependent, but will play an important role in mediating
some of the impacts of rapid climate change in this system.
Repository Name:
EPIC Alfred Wegener Institut
Type:
Article
,
isiRev
Format:
application/pdf
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