Department of Biological Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA.
J Exp Biol. 2021 Oct 1;224(19). doi: 10.1242/jeb.227363. Epub 2021 Oct 5.
Developing animals display a tremendous ability to change the course of their developmental path in response to the environment they experience, a concept referred to as developmental plasticity. This change in behavior, physiology or cellular processes is primarily thought to allow animals to better accommodate themselves to the surrounding environment. However, existing data on developmental stress and whether it brings about beneficial or detrimental outcomes show conflicting results. There are several well-referred hypotheses related to developmental stress in the current literature, such as the environmental matching, silver spoon and thrifty phenotype hypotheses. These hypotheses speculate that the early-life environment defines the capacity of the physiological functions and behavioral tendencies and that this change is permanent and impacts the fitness of the individual. These hypotheses also postulate there is a trade-off among organ systems and physiological functions when resources are insufficient. Published data on avian taxa show that some effects of developmental nutritional and thermal stressors are long lasting, such as the effects on body mass and birdsong. Although hypotheses on developmental stress are based on fitness components, data on reproduction and survival are scarce, making it difficult to determine which hypothesis these data support. Furthermore, most physiological and performance measures are collected only once; thus, the physiological mechanisms remain undertested. Here, we offer potential avenues of research to identify reasons behind the contrasting results in developmental stress research and possible ways to determine whether developmental programming due to stressors is beneficial or detrimental, including quantifying reproduction and survival in multiple environments, measuring temporal changes in physiological variables and testing for stress resistance later in life.
发育中的动物表现出巨大的能力，可以根据它们所经历的环境改变其发育路径，这一概念被称为发育可塑性。这种行为、生理或细胞过程的变化主要被认为使动物能够更好地适应周围的环境。然而，关于发育应激及其是否带来有益或有害结果的现有数据显示出相互矛盾的结果。目前的文献中有几个与发育应激相关的、被广泛引用的假说，例如环境匹配假说、银汤匙假说和节俭表型假说。这些假说推测，早期环境决定了生理功能和行为倾向的能力，这种变化是永久性的，并影响个体的适应性。这些假说还假设，当资源不足时，器官系统和生理功能之间存在权衡。关于鸟类分类群的已发表数据表明，发育过程中的营养和热应激源的一些影响是持久的，例如对体重和鸟鸣的影响。尽管发育应激假说基于适应度成分，但关于繁殖和生存的数据却很少，因此很难确定这些数据支持哪种假说。此外，大多数生理和表现指标仅收集一次；因此，生理机制仍未得到充分检验。在这里，我们提供了一些潜在的研究途径，可以确定发育应激研究中对比结果的原因，以及确定应激引起的发育编程是否有益或有害的可能方法，包括在多个环境中量化繁殖和生存、测量生理变量的时间变化以及测试后期的抗应激能力。
