Data and R scripts from: Which factors determine the long-term effect of poor early-life nutrition? A meta-analytic review

Early-life conditions can have long-lasting effects (experiential
legacies) on an individual’s performance. Experiential legacies are an
important source of variation among mature individuals because responses
to early-life environments vary widely. Yet, the factors influencing the
magnitudes and directions of phenotypic responses to experiential legacies
are poorly understood, hindering our ability to predict adult phenotypes
and population-level consequences of environmental stressors. To better
understand these issues, we examined how experiential legacies varied with
the type of phenotypic response (e.g., reproduction, longevity),
characteristics of the individual, and characteristics of the stressful
conditions imposed. We conducted a meta-analytic review (nspecies = 65,
nstudies = 81), examining experiential legacies of early-life nutritional
restriction. We found generally consistent negative or neutral impacts of
early nutritional stress on later-life phenotypes, indicating that
positive responses to early nutritional restriction may be rare among
organisms. Our results also demonstrated differences in how experiential
legacies were expressed in specific dimensions of an individual’s
phenotype; for example, magnitude and direction differed among responses
in development rate (weak negative response), offspring quality and
quantity (strong negative), and longevity (neutral response). We also
found that the harsher the early-life nutritional stress, the stronger the
negative nutritional legacy. Our results emphasize the complicated
interactions among a suite of phenotypic responses in determining
individual performance. Given the potential for individual performance to
inform the demography and dynamics of populations, we offer avenues for
future research that can improve our understanding of how experiential
legacies of nutrition or other early-life conditions affect populations.