Transgenerational effects in an ecological context: conditioning of adult sea urchins to upwelling conditions alters maternal provisioning and progeny phenotype

Transgenerational plasticity occurs when the conditions experienced by the parental generation influences the phenotype of their progeny. This may in turn affect progeny performance and physiological tolerance, providing a means by which organisms cope with rapid environmental change. We conditioned adult purple sea urchins, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, to combined pCO⁠2 and temperature conditions reflective of in situ conditions of their natural habitat, the benthos in kelp forests of nearshore California, and then assessed the performance of their progeny raised under different pCO⁠2 levels. Adults were conditioned during gametogenesis to treatments that reflected static non-upwelling (~650 μatm pCO⁠2, ~17°C) and upwelling (~1300 μatm pCO⁠2, ~13°C) conditions. Following approximately 4 months of conditioning, the adults were spawned and embryos were raised under low pCO⁠2 (~450 μatm pCO⁠2) or high pCO⁠2 (~1050 μatm pCO⁠2) treatments to determine if differential maternal conditioning...