Testing for context-dependent effects of prenatal thyroid hormones on offspring survival and physiology: an experimental temperature manipulation.

ABSTRACT: Maternal effects via hormonal transfer from the mother to the offspring provide a tool to translate environmental cues to the offspring. Experimental manipulations of maternally transferred hormones have yielded increasingly contradictory results, which may be explained by differential effects of hormones under different environmental contexts. Yet context-dependent effects have rarely been experimentally tested. We therefore studied whether maternally transferred thyroid hormones (THs) exert context-dependent effects on offspring survival and physiology by manipulating both egg TH levels and post-hatching nest temperature in wild pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca) using a full factorial design. We found no clear evidence for context-dependent effects of prenatal THs related to postnata

SUBMITTER: Hsu BY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7471313 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature