Maternal age at reproduction drives multigenerational variation in life-history traits
Zhang, K.; SCHAUSBERGER, P.; Holwell, G.; Zhang, Z.-Q.
Show abstract
Offspring phenotypes are often influenced by maternal age at reproduction. However, the persistence of such effects across multiple generations remains poorly understood, especially in rare cases where offspring of older mothers exhibit enhanced performance. Using the predatory mite Amblyseius herbicolus, we experimentally tested whether maternal age at reproduction influences offspring life history across two generations under contrasting dietary conditions. We found that grandmaternal (F0) and maternal (F1) age affected offspring (F2) developmental time and body size, but not hatching success, survival, or oviposition. The effect of maternal age on body size depended on grandmaternal age, suggesting that grandmaternal age mediates how mothers adjust offspring provisioning. Diet strongly influenced offspring traits but showed limited interaction with age effects. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate the persistence of an inverse Lansing effect across generations, whereby enhanced immature development is maintained without detectable trade-offs in reproduction or adult survival. These results identify maternal age as a key driver of transgenerational phenotypic variation, with important implications for population dynamics and responses to environmental change at the population level.
Matching journals
The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Temperature outweighs diet in shaping developmental performance in two cricket species via growth delays and physiological limits 95%
- Diet influences resource allocation in chemical defence but not melanin synthesis in an aposematic moth 94%
- Early-life environmental effects on mitochondrial aerobic metabolism: an experimental brood size manipulation in wild great tits 94%
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Density-by-diet interactions during larval development shape adult life-history trait expression and fitness in a polyphagous fly 96%
- Intergenerational Effects of Early Life Starvation on Life-History, Consumption, and Transcriptome of a Holometabolous Insect 95%
- Genetic variation in parental effects contribute to the evolutionary potential of prey responses to predation risk 94%
Similar papers in this journal
- Context-dependent effects of developmental and adult diet on life-history traits and their associations in outbred Drosophila melanogaster population 94%
- Like mother, like daughter? Phenotypic plasticity, environmental covariation, and heritability of size in a parthenogenetic wasp 94%
- The evolution of a placenta is not linked to increased brain size in poeciliid fishes 94%
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.