Meeting Abstract
Organisms can gain information about their environment via their own personal experience or via information that’s provided by their parents. A central problem, though, is how individuals integrate information from different sources. Cues may be additive, such that individuals who receive both personal and parental cues about their environment may have twice the phenotypic consequences as individuals who only receive cues from one source. Alternatively, individuals with multiple cues may just ignore redundant information. Here, we seek to understand how both parental and personal experience with predation risk alter offspring traits in threespined sticklebacks Gasterosteus aculeatus. In a 2×2 factorial experiment, we exposed mothers, fathers or both parents to a model predator prior to fertilization in order to evaluate the role of maternal and paternal experience with predation risk on offspring traits. At two months of age, half of the offspring were exposed to a model predator to compare the effect of personally versus transgenerationally-acquired information about predation risk on offspring traits. We found that offspring are more responsive to the experiences of their same-sex parent: daughters alter their behavior with respect to maternal experience while sons alter their behavior with respect to paternal experience. Moreover, personally and transgenerationally-acquired information elicited the same response: offspring displayed similar behaviors when they were directly exposed to predation risk or when their same-sex parent was exposed to predation risk, or when they received both cues. These results suggest that there are sex-specific effects of parental experiences in sticklebacks and highlight the importance of parents’ experience prior to fertilization for their offspring.
