Institute of Zoology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 845 06 Bratislava, Slovakia
Department of Biosciences, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, 515134 Prasanthi Nilayam, India.
J Exp Biol. 2019 May 20;222(Pt 10):jeb202184. doi: 10.1242/jeb.202184.
Whether the character of developmental plasticity is adaptive or non-adaptive has often been a matter of controversy. Although thermal developmental plasticity has been studied in for several traits, it is not entirely clear how it affects reproductive fitness. We, therefore, investigated how developmental temperature affects reproductive performance (early fecundity and egg-to-adult viability) of wild-caught We tested competing hypotheses on the character of developmental thermal plasticity using a full-factorial design with three developmental and adulthood temperatures within the natural thermal range of this species. To account for potential intraspecific differences, we examined flies from tropical (India) and temperate (Slovakia) climate zones. Our results show that flies from both populations raised at an intermediate developmental temperature (25°C) have comparable or higher early fecundity and fertility at all tested adulthood temperatures, while lower (17°C) or higher developmental temperatures (29°C) did not entail any advantage under the tested thermal regimes. Importantly, the superior thermal performance of flies raised at 25°C is apparent even after taking two traits positively associated with reproductive output into account: body size and ovariole number. Thus, in , development at a given temperature does not necessarily provide any advantage in this thermal environment in terms of reproductive fitness. Our findings strongly support the optimal developmental temperature hypothesis, which states that in different thermal environments, the highest fitness is achieved when an organism is raised at its optimal developmental temperature.
发育可塑性的特征是适应性的还是非适应性的，这常常是一个有争议的问题。尽管已经研究了几种性状的热发育可塑性，但它对生殖适应性的影响还不完全清楚。因此，我们研究了发育温度如何影响野生捕获的 的生殖表现（早期繁殖力和卵至成虫的存活率）。我们使用全因子设计，在该物种的自然温度范围内设置三个发育和成年温度，检验了发育热可塑性特征的竞争假说。为了考虑潜在的种内差异，我们检查了来自热带（印度）和温带（斯洛伐克）气候区的苍蝇。我们的结果表明，来自两个种群的苍蝇在中间发育温度（25°C）下培养，在所有测试的成年温度下，具有可比或更高的早期繁殖力和生育率，而较低（17°C）或较高的发育温度（29°C）在测试的热条件下没有任何优势。重要的是，即使考虑到两个与生殖产出呈正相关的特征：体型和卵巢管数量，在 25°C 下培养的苍蝇的优越热性能仍然明显。因此，在 中，在给定温度下的发育并不一定在生殖适应性方面提供任何优势。我们的研究结果强烈支持最佳发育温度假说，该假说指出，在不同的热环境中，当生物体在其最佳发育温度下生长时，其适应性最高。
