Abstract
Females experience considerable environmental variability when breeding seasons are long. Adverse nutritional conditions can result in a reduction in mating and reproduction. However, a return to good nutrition may help animals resume high reproductive investment. I tested the silver spoon hypothesis in which females raised under poor conditions are reproductively limited compared to those raised under good conditions regardless of their adult environment. I used a specialist herbivore, Narnia femorata (Hemiptera: Coreidae), that lives on seasonally changing cacti. I provided juveniles and adults with a cactus pad with fruit (good diet), without fruit (restricted diet), or an improved adult diet (no fruit as juveniles, fruit at adulthood) to simulate a seasonal change in their diets near the end of the breeding season. I found that both ovary size and egg presence were reduced for females fed the restricted diet compared to those fed the good diet. Females fed the improved diet grew large ovaries like those fed the good diet, but few produced any eggs. Interestingly, female mating behavior did not change but females were less attractive to males when fed restricted diets. My results support the silver spoon hypothesis for compensatory growth and suggest that tradeoffs may occur between early survival and future reproduction when females experience a poor early life diet.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Christine Miller, Daniela Wilner, and Ginny Greenway for their support with this experiment. I would also like to thank my amazing undergraduate research team that helped with this experiment including Skyler Brandfon, Amberlika Guruvadoo, Brandon Latchman, Meredith Lilley, Gagan Midathala, Joshua Vildor, and Maxwell Woolridge. They dedicated many hours and provided detailed data collection for which I am so grateful. I would also like to thank Camp Blanding Joint Training Center for allowing us to collect cactus and bugs on their 72 000-acre training site (Florida Army and National Guard). Finally, I would like to thank the EEB journal club at University of Florida, C.W. Miller, P.J. Moore, R.L. Rodriguez, F. Alberto, T.M. Palmer, and C. St. Mary for providing comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant no. IOS-1553100) and the UF Agricultural Experiment Station, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the US Department of Agriculture (HATCH under Grant No. FLA-ENY-005691).
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Cirino, L.A. Seasonal shift in diet affects female reproductive anatomy but not mating behavior. Oecologia 202, 397–411 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05398-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05398-7