Data from: Environmental variation mediates the evolution of anticipatory parental effects

Theory maintains that when future environment is predictable, parents
should adjust the phenotype of their offspring to match the anticipated
environment. The plausibility of positive anticipatory parental effects is
hotly debated and the experimental evidence for the evolution of such
effects is currently lacking. We experimentally investigated the evolution
of anticipatory maternal effects in a range of environments that differ
drastically in how predictable they are. Populations of the nematode
Caenorhabditis remanei, adapted to 20°C, were exposed to a novel
temperature (25°C) for 30 generations with either positive or zero
correlation between parent and offspring environment. We found that
populations evolving in novel environments that were predictable across
generations evolved a positive anticipatory maternal effect, since they
required maternal exposure to 25°C to achieve maximum reproduction in that
temperature. In contrast, populations evolving under zero environmental
correlation had lost this anticipatory maternal effect. Similar but weaker
patterns were found if instead rate-sensitive population growth was used
as a fitness measure. These findings demonstrate that anticipatory
parental effects evolve in response to environmental change so that
ill-fitting parental effects can be rapidly lost. Evolution of positive
anticipatory parental effects can aid population viability in rapidly
changing but predictable environments.