Data from: Maternal effects are long lasting and influence female offspring’s reproductive strategy in the swordtail fish Xiphophorus multilineatus

The adaptive benefits of maternal investment into individual offspring
(inherited environmental effects) will be shaped by selection on mothers
as well as their offspring, often across variable environments. We
examined how a mother’s nutritional environment interacted with her
offspring’s nutritional and social environment in Xiphophorus
multilineatus, a livebearing fish. Fry from mothers reared on two
different nutritional diets (HQ = high quality, and LQ = low quality) were
all reared on a LQ diet in addition to being split between two social
treatments: exposed to a large adult male during development, and not
exposed. Mothers raised on a HQ diet produce offspring that were not only
initially larger (at 14 days of age), but grew faster, and were larger at
sexual maturity, suggesting that the fry produced by mothers on LQ diets
were at a disadvantage. Male offspring from mothers raised on both diets
responded to the exposure to courter males by growing faster, however the
response of their sisters varied with mother’s diet; Females from HQ
mothers reduced growth if exposed to a courter male, while females from LQ
mothers increased growth. Therefore, we detected variation in maternal
investment depending on female size and diet, and the effects of this
variation on offspring were long-lasting and sex specific. Our results
support the maternal stress hypothesis, with selection on mothers to
reduce investment in low quality environments that was not beneficial to
the offspring. In addition, the interaction we detected between the
mother’s nutritional environment and the female offspring’s social
environment suggests that female offspring adopted different reproductive
strategies depending on maternal investment.