Meeting Abstract
Most organisms encounter some degree of environmental variation throughout their lifetime. To succeed and thrive in different environments, individuals can express plastic phenotypes, including plastic life history traits, to ensure some level of fitness across conditions. Previous work has described how several traits relevant to fitness respond to different temperatures, but much of this work has focused on only one or a few traits, and overlooked the interactions between traits. Few have considered the effects of temperature on parental care – a highly labile trait that can have important effects on fitness. Here, we take an integrative approach to study how organisms cope with temperature variation in their environment. We characterized thermal reaction norms of several life history traits and parental behaviours in the burying beetle Nicrophorus orbicollis. Both male and female N. orbicollis exhibit complex parental care behaviours, including directly provisioning food to their larvae. We find that life history traits show varying levels of plasticity across temperatures, and some traits exhibited family-level variation in reaction norms, which might reflect underlying heritable variation in plasticity. Temperature affected per capita parental care, offspring size, and brood size. We also found that eclosion success across temperatures varied between families, and that there may be constraints on parental care that prevent N. orbicollis from increasing overall levels of parental care sufficiently to buffer against challenging temperatures. Taken together, our results suggest that life history responses to temperature reflect the incorporation of several reaction norms, which vary among families and have important fitness consequences.
