Contribution of maternal effects to dietary selection in Mediterranean fruit flies

Abstract

Individual responses to dietary variation represent a fundamental component of fitness, and nutritional adaptation can occur over just a few generations. Maternal effects can show marked proximate responses to nutrition, but whether they contribute to longer term dietary adaptation is unclear. Here, we tested the hypotheses that maternal effects: (i) contribute to dietary adaptation, (ii) diminish when dietary conditions are constant between generations, (iii) are trait‐specific and (iv) interact with high‐ and low‐quality food. We used experimental evolution regimes in the medfly ( Ceratitis capitata ) to test these predictions by subjecting an outbred laboratory‐adapted population to replicated experimental evolution on either constant high calorie sugar (‘A’) or low‐calorie starch (‘S’) larval diets, with a standard adult diet across both regimes. We measured the contribution of maternal effects by comparing developmental and adult phenotypes of individuals reared on their own diet with those swapped onto the opposite diet for either one or two generations (high and low maternal effect conditions, respectively), both at the start and after 30 generations of selection. Initially, there were strong maternal effects on female body mass and male mating success but not larval survival. Interestingly, the initial maternal effects observed in female body mass and male mating success showed sex‐specific interactions when individuals from high calorie regimes were tested on low calorie diets. However, as populations responded to selection, the effects of maternal provisioning on all traits diminished. The results broadly supported the predictions. They show how the contribution of maternal effects to dietary responses evolves in a context‐dependent manner, with significant variation across different fitness‐related traits. We conclude that maternal effects can evolve during nutritional adaptation and hence may be an important life history trait to measure, rather than to routinely minimize.

Genotypic variation of transgenerational plasticity can be explained by environmental predictability at origins

“…First, the environment must be heterogeneous. In a stable environment, parental environmental cues are uninformative and the influence of parental environmental can evolve to slightly negative values (Klironomos et al 2013, Kuijper and Hoyle 2015, Leftwich et al 2019). Second, the environmental heterogeneity must be within an intermediate frequency and without repeated extreme events, i.e.…”

Temperature-modulated maternal effects vary with offspring developmental stage inDrosophila melanogaster

“…Maternal effects during development tend to occur under both favorable and stressful conditions (Rösvik et al, 2020), which may facilitate adaptation to novel environments (Fox & Savalli, 1998; Leftwich et al, 2019) or buffer against changing conditions through transgenerational phenotypic plasticity (Shama et al, 2014). We found that maternal effects, besides being influenced by the offspring’s developmental stage, can also depend on other factors such as the offspring environmental conditions.…”

Effect of Wolbachia Infection and Adult Food on the Sexual Signaling of Males of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly Ceratitis capitata

“…Several studies of the Mediterranean fruit fly have shown that adult protein-rich diets enhance male sexual performance attributes such as sexual signaling [ 50 , 51 , 52 ], participation in leks, mating success and duration, and inhibition of female remating [ 34 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 ]. In addition to the effect of adult diets, there are also studies that demonstrate the determinant effect of larval diet content on both male sexual performance [ 59 ] and other insect fitness traits [ 60 , 61 ], and the nutritional adaptation that occurs during long-term laboratory rearing that leads to significant variation across different fitness-related traits [ 59 , 61 ]. Another critical factor that affects sexual calling behavior is the age of the males.…”