Intergenerational effects of ocean temperature variation: Early life benefits are short-lived in threespine stickleback

Current climate change models predict an increase in temperature variability and extreme events such as heatwaves, and organisms need to cope with consequent changes to environmental variation. Non-genetic inheritance mechanisms can enable parental generations to prime their offspring's abiliti...

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Published in:	PloS one Vol. 19; no. 8; p. e0307030
Main Authors:	Spence-Jones, Helen Clare, Pein, Carla M, Shama, Lisa N S
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States Public Library of Science 02-08-2024 Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects:	Animals Climate Change Climate change models Climate models Climate prediction Climatic changes Clutch size DNA methylation Environmental changes Environmental conditions Experiments Exposure Female Fishes Gametogenesis Gasterosteus aculeatus Genetic diversity Heat waves Juveniles Male Metabolism Natural populations Ocean models Ocean temperature Oceans and Seas Offspring Organisms Parents Phenotype Phenotypic plasticity Phenotypic variations Smegmamorpha - growth & development Smegmamorpha - physiology Temperature Temperature effects Temperature variability Temperature variations Variance Water temperature Weather forecasting Sylt
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Summary:	Current climate change models predict an increase in temperature variability and extreme events such as heatwaves, and organisms need to cope with consequent changes to environmental variation. Non-genetic inheritance mechanisms can enable parental generations to prime their offspring's abilities to acclimate to environmental change-but they may also be deleterious. When parents are exposed to predictable environments, intergenerational plasticity can lead to better offspring trait performance in matching environments. Alternatively, parents exposed to variable or unpredictable environments may use plastic bet-hedging strategies to adjust the phenotypic variance among offspring. Here, we used a model species, the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), to test whether putatively adaptive intergenerational effects can occur in response to shifts in environmental variation as well as to shifts in environmental mean, and whether parents employ plastic bet-hedging strategies in response to increasing environmental variation. We used a full-factorial, split-clutch experiment with parents and offspring exposed to three temperature regimes: constant, natural variation, and increased variation. We show that within-generation exposure to increased temperature variation reduces growth of offspring, but having parents that were exposed to natural temperature variation during gametogenesis may offset some early-life negative growth effects. However, these mitigating intergenerational effects do not appear to persist later in life. We found no indication that stickleback mothers plastically altered offspring phenotypic variance (egg size or clutch size) in response to temperature variation. However, lower inter-individual variance of juvenile fish morphology in offspring of increased variation parents may imply the presence of conservative bet-hedging strategies in natural populations. Overall, in our experiment, parental exposure to temperature variation had limited effects on offspring fitness-related traits. Natural levels of environmental variation promoted a potentially adaptive intergenerational response in early life development, but under more challenging conditions associated with increased environmental variation, the effect was lost.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	1932-6203 1932-6203
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0307030