Data for: Effects of parental age on salt stress tolerance in an aquatic plant

Parental age influences components of offspring fitness in many species. The ability to tolerate stress also affects fitness, but less is known regarding changes in offspring stress tolerance with increasing parental age, especially in plants. We examined first and fifth-born clonal offspring (using birth order as a proxy for parental age), and compared their fitness in several sub-lethal concentrations of salt (NaCl), to investigate the interactive effects of birth order and salt stress on the offspring of the aquatic plant Lemna minor L. We found that increasing salt concentration reduced reproduction particularly at early ages, which detrimentally affected fitness, as measured by the intrinsic rate of natural increase. Fifth offspring had greater fitness than first offspring, potentially due to the hump-shaped relationship between offspring fitness and birth order observed in other studies on Lemna, with fifth offspring near the peak of the hump. We found no interactive effect of bir..., , R software is required to run the script.