Preparing offspring for a dangerous world: potential costs of being wrong.

ABSTRACT: Adaptive maternal responses to stressful environments before young are born can follow two non-exclusive pathways: either the mother reduces current investment in favor of future investment, or influences offspring growth and development in order to fit offspring phenotype to the stressful environment. Inducing such developmental cues, however, may be risky if the environment changes meanwhile, resulting in maladapted offspring. Here we test the effects of a predator-induced maternal effect in a predator-free postnatal environment. We manipulated perceived predation-risk for breeding female great tits by exposing them to stuffed models of either a predatory bird or a non-predatory control. Offspring were raised either in an environment matching the maternal one by exchanging whole broods w

SUBMITTER: Coslovsky M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3492257 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature