Meeting Abstract
Exposure to prenatal stress affects an offspring’s physiology, development and behavior. Although most research to date has branded short-term effects as negative impacts, recent work indicates that prenatal stress is a signal to match offspring to the quality of their future environment to maximize fitness. Although we expect males and females to differ in their phenotypic responses given sex-specific differences in proximate and ultimate costs, few studies have examined sex-specific effects of pre- and postnatal stress on offspring traits. We examine sex-specific effects of pre- and postnatal stress on early-life body size, physiology and survival in Chinook salmon, a species with differential growth and reproductive investment between sexes. We predict males will be more sensitive to a prenatal signal because they are expected to invest more in body size for mate competition. We mimicked a maternal stress signal by exposing eggs to biologically relevant doses of cortisol (low, high, control). Offspring were reared in semi-natural streams either simulating drought (stressful post-natal environment) or control water conditions. We aim to examine responses in morphometrics, physiological traits and survival within the context of whether pre- and post-natal stress exposure sex-specifically matches offspring phenotype and performance to the quality of the offspring’s expected future environment.
