Environmental stress increases the magnitude of nonadditive genetic variation in offspring fitness in the frog Crinia georgiana

When organisms encounter heterogeneous environments, selection may favor the ability of individuals to tailor their phenotypes to suit the prevailing conditions. Understanding the genetic basis of plastic responses is therefore vital for predicting whether susceptible populations can adapt and persist under new selection pressures. Here, we investigated whether there is potential for adaptive plasticity in development time in the quacking frog Crinia georgiana, a species experiencing a drying climate. Using a North Carolina II breeding design, we exposed 90 family groups to two water depth treatments (baseline and low-water) late in larval development. We estimated the contribution of additive and non-additive sources of genetic variation to early offspring fitness under both environments. Our results revealed a marked decline in larval fitness under the stressful (low-water) rearing environment, but also that additive genetic variation was negligible for all traits. However, in most ca...