Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior, School of Integrative Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2024 Jan 10;291(2014):20232582. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.2582.
Parental care is a critical determinant of offspring fitness, and parents adjust their care in response to ecological challenges, including predation risk. The experiences of both mothers and fathers can influence phenotypes of future generations (transgenerational plasticity). If it is adaptive for parents to alter parental care in response to predation risk, then we expect F and F offspring who receive transgenerational cues of predation risk to shift their parental care behaviour if these ancestral cues reliably predict a similarly risky environment as their F parents. Here, we used three-spined sticklebacks () to understand how paternal exposure to predation risk prior to mating alters reproductive traits and parental care behaviour in unexposed F sons and F grandsons. Sons of predator-exposed fathers took more attempts to mate than sons of control fathers. F sons and F grandsons with two (maternal and paternal) predator-exposed grandfathers shifted their paternal care (fanning) behaviour in strikingly similar ways: they fanned less initially, but fanned more near egg hatching. This shift in fanning behaviour matches shifts observed in response to direct exposure to predation risk, suggesting a highly conserved response to pre-fertilization predator exposure that persists from the F to the F and F generations.
亲代照顾是后代适合度的关键决定因素，父母会根据生态挑战（包括捕食风险）来调整照顾行为。母亲和父亲的经历都会影响后代的表型（跨代可塑性）。如果父母适应捕食风险来改变亲代照顾，那么我们期望在 F 和 F 代中，如果这些祖先线索可靠地预测到与 F 代父母相似的危险环境，那么接收捕食风险跨代线索的后代会改变他们的亲代照顾行为。在这里，我们使用三刺鱼（）来了解在交配前雄性暴露于捕食风险如何改变未暴露的 F 代儿子和 F 代孙子的繁殖特征和亲代照顾行为。暴露于捕食者的父亲的儿子比对照组父亲的儿子尝试交配的次数更多。有两个（母系和父系）暴露于捕食者的祖父的 F 代儿子和 F 代孙子以惊人相似的方式改变了他们的亲代照顾（扇动）行为：它们最初扇动得更少，但在卵孵化附近扇动得更多。这种扇动行为的转变与直接暴露于捕食风险时观察到的转变相匹配，这表明对受精前捕食者暴露的高度保守反应从 F 代持续到 F 代和 F 代。
