Maternal effects are no match for stressful conditions: a test of the maternal match hypothesis in a common zooplankter.

1. Maternal effects modulate population responses to environmental conditions and so are predicted to play a large role in the responses of organisms to global change.
2. In response to one such aspect of global change, the eutrophication of freshwaters and associated blooms of the toxin-producing cyanobacteria species Microcystis aeruginosa, the rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus produces larger offspring.
3. We hypothesized that rotifers exposed to Microcystis may be adaptively increasing offspring investment and offspring fitness (i.e. the maternal match hypothesis).
4. We explicitly tested the consequences of this differential investment by rearing offspring produced by rotifers reared under Microcystis and the nontoxigenic green alga Chlamydomonas in a full factorial design, where offspring were raised under the maternal diet or the opposite food source.
5. We measured age-specific fecundity, survival, and population growth rates under these conditions and found that maternal expo...