Meeting Abstract
An organism’s phenotype is the product of its genotype, the environment that the organism experiences as well as the environment experienced by its mother. The effects of the maternal environment on phenotype expression in offspring are termed maternal effects and they can have critical impacts on offspring development, growth, and performance. Maternal exposure to stress and toxins can result in physiological, behavioral, and developmental changes in offspring. In most marine invertebrates, the effects of acute or chronic exposure to these agents are unknown. We aimed to determine whether chronic maternal exposure to the endocrine-disrupting chemical, 17β-estradiol, has effects on the growth, behavior, feeding, and potentially the development of adults and offspring of a common saltmarsh invertebrate, Nematostella vectensis. In our study, anemones were exposed for 35 days to one of 7 treatments: seawater control, DMSO control, and 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000 ng/mL of 17β -estradiol. Anemones were spawned prior to, and at 1, 3, and 5 weeks during the exposure period; unfertilized eggs were collected from females and frozen for later biochemical constituent analyses, which are ongoing. During the exposure period, anemones in the highest doses of 17β-estradiol displayed deflated morphologies and tentacle retraction, behaviors that were dissimilar to anemones exposed to low concentrations of 17β-estradiol or the two control treatments. These behaviors may have impacted maternal provisioning of eggs with biochemical constituents, particularly lipids, as 17β-estradiol is a lipophilic molecule. The results from this study provide information on how chronic exposure to marine toxins can potentially lead to altered behavioral and developmental outcomes in mothers and their offspring.
