Maternal effects have become an important field of study in evolutionary ecology and there is an ongoing debate regarding their adaptive significance. Some maternal effects can act to increase offspring fitness and are called ‘adaptive maternal effects’. However, other maternal effects decrease offspring fitness and there is confusion regarding whether certain maternal effects are indeed adaptive or merely physiological inevitabilities. Here we suggest that the focus on the consequences of maternal effects for offspring fitness only and the use of ‘snapshot’ estimates of fitness have misdirected our effort to understand the evolution of maternal effects. We suggest that selection typically acts on maternal effects to maximise maternal rather than (or in addition to) offspring fitness. We highlight the importance of considering how maternal effects influence maternal fitness across a mother's lifetime and describe four broad types of maternal effects using an outcome‐based approach. Overall, we suggest that many maternal effects will have an adaptive basis for mothers, regardless of whether these effects increase or decrease survival or reproductive success of individual offspring.

Many physiological responses in present-day coral reefs to climate change are interpreted as consistent with the imminent disappearance of modern reefs globally because of annual mass bleaching events, carbonate dissolution, and insufficient time for substantial evolutionary responses. Emerging evidence for variability in the coral calcification response to acidification, geographical variation in bleaching susceptibility and recovery, responses to past climate change, and potential rates of adaptation to rapid warming supports an alternative scenario in which reef degradation occurs with greater temporal and spatial heterogeneity than current projections suggest. Reducing uncertainty in projecting coral reef futures requires improved understanding of past responses to rapid climate change; physiological responses to interacting factors, such as temperature, acidification, and nutrients; and the costs and constraints imposed by acclimation and adaptation.

Body size determines total reproductive-energy output. Most theories assume reproductive output is a fixed proportion of size, with respect to mass, but formal macroecological tests are lacking. Management based on that assumption risks underestimating the contribution of larger mothers to replenishment, hindering sustainable harvesting. We test this assumption in marine fishes with a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis of the intraspecific mass scaling of reproductive-energy output. We show that larger mothers reproduce disproportionately more than smaller mothers in not only fecundity but also total reproductive energy. Our results reset much of the theory on how reproduction scales with size and suggest that larger mothers contribute disproportionately to population replenishment. Global change and overharvesting cause fish sizes to decline; our results provide quantitative estimates of how these declines affect fisheries and ecosystem-level productivity.

An increasing number of short-term experimental studies show significant effects of projected ocean warming and ocean acidification on the performance on marine organisms. Yet, it remains unclear if we can reliably predict the impact of climate change on marine populations and ecosystems, because we lack sufficient understanding of the capacity for marine organisms to adapt to rapid climate change. In this review, we emphasise why an evolutionary perspective is crucial to understanding climate change impacts in the sea and examine the approaches that may be useful for addressing this challenge. We first consider what the geological record and present-day analogues of future climate conditions can tell us about the potential for adaptation to climate change. We also examine evidence that phenotypic plasticity may assist marine species to persist in a rapidly changing climate. We then outline the various experimental approaches that can be used to estimate evolutionary potential, focusing on molecular tools, quantitative genetics, and experimental evolution, and we describe the benefits of combining different approaches to gain a deeper understanding of evolutionary potential. Our goal is to provide a platform for future research addressing the evolutionary potential for marine organisms to cope with climate change.

Anticipatory parental effects (APE's) occur when parents adjust the phenotype of their offspring to match the local environment, so as to increase the fitness of both parents and offspring. APE's, as in the evolution of adaptive phenotypic plasticity more generally, are predicated on the idea that the parental environment is a reliable predictor of the offspring environment. Most studies on APE's fail to explicitly consider environmental predictability so risk searching for APE's under circumstances where they are unlikely to occur. This failure is perhaps one of the major reasons for mixed evidence for APE's in a recent meta‐analysis. Here, we highlight some often‐overlooked assumptions in studies of APE's and provide a framework for identifying and testing APE's. Our review highlights the importance of measuring environmental predictability, outlines the minimal requirements for experimental designs, explains the important differences between relative and absolute measures of offspring fitness, and highlights some potential issues in assigning components of offspring fitness to parental fitness. Our recommendations should result in more targeted and effective tests of APE's. Synthesis A decent set of theory is available to understand when certain kinds of parental effects might act to increase parental fitness (i.e. be ‘adaptive’). This theory could be better incorporated into empirical studies on anticipatory parental effects (APE's). Here, we provide practical advice for how empirical studies can more closely align with the theoretical underpinnings of adaptive parental effects. In short, robust inferences on APE's require quantitative estimates of environmental predictability in the field over the space and time scales relevant to the life history of the study organism as well as an understanding of when to use absolute or relative offspring fitness.