Maternal diet and age alter direct and indirect relationships between life history traits across multiple generations

1. Maternal age has important consequences for offspring fitness, with influences on size, development, and reproductive schedules. Such maternal age effects may be driven by differential provisioning of resources, yet little is known about the role of environmental supply of nutritional resources in mediating such effects.
2. We tested the influence of limiting nutritional resource, dietary phosphorus (P), on maternal age effects across multiple generations by examining the potential interactive effects of maternal nutrition and age on daughter and granddaughter life history traits in the freshwater crustacean Daphnia pulicaria.
3. Maternal age and diet had significant but contrasting effects on offspring life history. We did not observe any evidence that age effects on offspring life history are mediated by maternal diet. However, granddaughter growth and size at maturation were influenced by the interaction between grandmaternal age and diet, suggesting that the appearance of trans...