Paternal condition affects offspring reproduction and life history in a sex-specific manner in Drosophila melanogaster

Nongenetic parental effects can contribute to the adaptation of species to changing environments by circumventing some of the limitations of genetic inheritance. A clearer understanding of the influence of nongenetic inheritance and its potentially sex-specific responses in daughters and sons is needed to better predict the evolutionary trajectories of species. However, whereas nongenetic maternal effects have long been recognized and widely studied, comparatively little is known about corresponding paternal effects. Here, by following 30 isogenic lines of Drosophila melanogaster across two generations, each reared under two dietary regimes in each generation, we tested how protein restriction during larval development of the fathers affects the fitness and health of their daughters and sons. We then quantified genetic and non-genetic paternal, and direct environmental, effects across multiple axes of offspring fitness. Daughters and sons responded differently to their father’s developm..., Study animals
Throughout this study, we followed 30 focal isolines (Parsons and Hosgood 1967; David et al. 2005) of D. melanogaster across two generations. Each isoline was derived from a single outbred population with 15 generations of full-sibling inbreeding (Lüpold et al. 2012; Lupold et al. 2013), reaching a theoretical homozygosity of 96% (Falconer et al. 1996)⁠. Diet was manipulated during larval development. Since holometabolous insects grow only during their larval stages, adult size and relative investments in different tissues are determined before adult emergence, meaning that the developmental period can have dramatic long-term consequences for adult physiology and reproduction (e.g., McGraw et al. 2007; Andersen et al. 2010; De Nardo et al. 2021; Macartney et al. 2021). Additionally, manipulating diet only during larval development appeared more ecologically relevant in that adult Drosophila are less likely to experience malnutrition than larvae in a natural setting due to ..., There is one Excel file for each of the generations. Each of the two Excel files contains 3 sheets:
1: the single assays with focal females: \"F0_f_single_progeny\" or \"F1_f_single_progeny\"
2: the single assays with focal males: \"F0_m_single_progeny\" or \"F1_m_single_progeny\"
3: the competitive mating assays with focal males: \"F0_comp\" or \"F1_comp\"