Abstract
Maternal effects are one of the most interesting topics in evolutionary ecology as they can affect the rate of evolution and population dynamics by phenotypic manipulation of offspring related to fitness. At present, studies examining the interaction between maternal environment effects and maternal age (birth order) effects are scarce. We designed an experiment to reveal whether environmentally induced maternal manipulation works equally on offspring across birth orders in rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus. In the experiment, newborn amictic mothers (F0) were cultured parallelly in low (LD) and high (HD) population density. Offspring (F1) of young (YF0) and old (OF0) mothers in both LD and HD groups were cultured under a crowded condition and the mixis ratios of both F1 and F2 were examined. Results show that F1 from HD-YF0 had a significantly higher mixis ratio and those amictic ones produced daughters (F2) with higher mixis ratio in response to crowding than those from HD-OF0. In contrast, no such differences among F1 siblings were found in the LD-F0 group. Therefore, the effect of maternal age on the sexual propensity of the offspring can be affected independently by the maternal population density.
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6 Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author (email: cjniu@bnu.edu.cn).
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 31470445, 30970349)
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Li, W., Niu, C. & Li, X. Offspring of aged mothers of rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus shows lower sexual propensity than their elder siblings under crowded conditions. J. Ocean. Limnol. 37, 1604–1610 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-019-8203-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-019-8203-0