Meeting Abstract
Animals must respond to complex environmental conditions by effectively allocating resources toward different fitness-related traits, including those associated with sexual selection. However, when faced with challenging conditions (e.g., thermal or nutritional variability), the partitioning of resources among these traits may not be equal. For example, non-ideal developmental conditions may speed development at the expense of body size. Typically, studies examine the plasticity of trait-trait tradeoffs by manipulating (at most) a single environmental variable, such as food availability or temperature. However, environments are complex, and many environmental factors vary simultaneously. Thus, we used male sand field crickets (Gryllus firmus) to investigate how multiple environmental variables influence the developmental plasticity of a number of fitness-related traits (e.g., survival, growth rate, developmental time, body size, and locomotor musculature), some of which are associated with sexual selection. For example, relative to their smaller counterparts, G. firmus males with larger body size and larger mandibles are more likely to win male-male contests and achieve fertilization. We factorially manipulated variation in food availability and temperature fluctuation because these two abiotic factors can naturally covary and often indicate the quality of a given environment (e.g., favorable environments may be characterized by unlimited food availability and stable temperature). Our results will provide insight into the dynamics by which animals prioritize important traits due to a range of developmental environments—from hypothetically low quality (low food availability and fluctuating temperature) to high quality (high food availability and stable temperature) conditions.
