Maternal and cohort effects modulate offspring responses to multiple stressors

Current concerns about climate change has led to intensive research attempting to understand how climate driven stressors affect the performance of organisms, in particular on offspring of many invertebrate and fish. Although stressors are likely to act on several stages of the life cycle, little is known about their action across life phases, for instance how multiple stressors experienced simultaneously in the maternal environment can modulate the responses to the same stressors operating in the offspring environment. Here, we study how performance of offspring of a marine invertebrate (shore crab Carcinus maenas) in response to two stressors (temperature and salinity) changes if the same stressors are experienced at the time of embryogenesis in cohorts of mothers breeding eggs at different seasons. On average, offspring responses were antagonistic: high temperature mitigated the negative effects of low salinity on survival. However, the magnitude of the response was modulated by the ...