Intergenerations effects of starvation on Athalia

Intergenerational effects, also known as parental effects in which the offspring phenotype is influenced by the parental phenotype, can occur in response to factors that occur not only in early but also in late parental life. However, little is known about how these parental life stage-specific environments interact with each other and with the offspring environment to influence offspring phenotypes, particularly in organisms that realize distinct niches across ontogeny. We examined the effects of parental larval starvation and adult reproductive environment on offspring traits under matching or mismatching offspring larval starvation conditions using the holometabolous, haplodiploid insect Athalia rosae (turnip sawfly). We show that parental larval starvation had trait-dependent intergenerational effects on both life-history and consumption traits of offspring larvae, partly in interaction with offspring conditions, while there was no significant effect of parental adult reproductive e...