Meeting Abstract
Animals regularly deal with environmental changes by effectively allocating scarce resources toward somatic and reproductive tissues. However, when faced with challenging conditions, the partitioning of resources among these traits may not be equal. Typically, studies examine the plasticity of tradeoffs by manipulating (at most) a single environmental variable, such as food availability or temperature. However, many environmental factors vary simultaneously. Thus, we investigated how multiple environmental variables influence the developmental plasticity of a number of fitness-related traits (e.g., survival, growth, and body size), as well as an important tradeoff between investment into flight musculature and fecundity. In female sand field crickets (Gryllus firmus), 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 preliminary results indicate a tradeoff (a negative relationship) between flight musculature and fecundity, and that increased food availability promotes investment into ovaries at the expense of reduced investment into flight musculature. Other early results indicate that fluctuating developmental temperatures increase growth and developmental rate. Together, these results indicate that each environmental factor influenced a different set of fitness-related traits and/or tradeoffs thereby highlighting the need to examine the effects of more than one factor on animal traits and trait-trait interactions.
