Maternal effects and the outcome of interspecific competition.

ABSTRACT: Maternal environmental effects create lagged population responses to past environments. Although they are ubiquitous and vary in expression across taxa, it remains unclear if and how their presence alters competitive interactions in ecological communities.Here, we use a discrete-time competition model to simulate how maternal effects alter competitive dynamics in fluctuating and constant environments. Further, we explore how omitting maternal effects alter estimates of known model parameters from observational time series data.Our simulations demonstrate that (i) maternal effects change competitive outcomes, regardless of whether competitors otherwise interact neutrally or exhibit non-neutral competitive differences, (ii) the consequences of maternal effects for competitive outcomes are me

SUBMITTER: Van Allen B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8216948 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature