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Context dependence of transgenerational plasticity: the influence of parental temperature depends on offspring environment and sex

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Abstract

Under environmental change, the relationship between phenotype and fitness can change rapidly, leaving populations vulnerable. Plasticity within and between generations could provide the fastest mitigation to environmental change. However, plasticity may depend on interactions among parental environment, offspring environment and offspring sex, and we know little of how these interactions manifest. We examine the importance of parental and offspring thermal environment in the context of a terrestrial ectotherm (the jacky lizard, Amphibolurus muricatus), where the thermal environment depends on complex thermoregulatory behaviours. By manipulating both parental and offspring thermoregulatory (basking) opportunities in a full factorial design, we found that transgenerational plasticity was highly context dependent. Overall, longer parental thermoregulatory opportunities led to increased growth in offspring, providing a clear fitness benefit to daughters but inducing a cost of increased oxidative stress in sons. Daughters, but not sons, received the greatest advantage when their thermal environment matched that of their parents. The offspring thermal environment had little independent effect on offspring phenotype. Together, the results suggest that both directional selection on offspring size (leading to growth being dependent on thermal conditions) and selection for anticipatory parental effects operate, but with a different balance in males and females. More broadly, restrictions in thermoregulatory opportunities under climatic warming will have negative consequences both within and between generations, but the exact nature will depend on the evolved functional form of plasticity.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (UNSW) and the Australian Research Council (DE120101446, LES; DP150100676, R. Brooks). We would like to thank the many volunteers and research assistants who helped with captive colony maintenance, including: Claudia Crowther, Mitchell Hodgson, Claire Nelson, Emily Rayner, and Georgia Zu. The manuscript was improved by comments from two anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth, and Environmental Sciences, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Lisa E. Schwanz, Jordann Crawford-Ash & Teagan Gale

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  1. Lisa E. Schwanz
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  2. Jordann Crawford-Ash
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  3. Teagan Gale
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LES designed the study; LES, JCA and TG performed the research and contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Lisa E. Schwanz.

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All applicable institutional and/or national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed. The research was conducted under ACEC 13/106B and 16/137A.

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Communicated by Donald Miles.

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Schwanz, L.E., Crawford-Ash, J. & Gale, T. Context dependence of transgenerational plasticity: the influence of parental temperature depends on offspring environment and sex. Oecologia 194, 391–401 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04783-w

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