Data from: What kind of maternal effects can be selected for in fluctuating environments?

Just as developmental plasticity can evolve when developing individuals get informational cues about their future environment, deterministic maternal effects, where offspring trait values depend on the maternal environment, can evolve when mothers gain reliable information about future environments. Randomizing maternal effects (often called diversifying bet-hedging), where offspring trait values are randomized, can evolve even when information about future environments is unavailable. We investigate the routes that lead to the evolution of randomized and deterministic maternal effects in environments that show correlated fluctuations between two environmental states. We compare the strength of selection for deterministic and randomizing maternal effects, and explicitly include maternal fitness costs in producing alternative offspring trait values. We find that only a small set of environmental parameters allow randomizing maternal effects to outcompete deterministic maternal effects; not only must there be little or no information available about future environments, but the frequency with which different environments are present must fall within a narrow range. By contrast, we find that deterministic maternal effects can always invade an ancestral state not expressing a maternal effect, even if the amount of environmental information available is low. Deterministic maternal effects are much more likely to evolve than randomizing maternal effects.