Under environmental change, the relationship between phenotype and fitness can change rapidly, leaving populations vulnerable. Plasticity within and between generations could provide the fastest mitigation to environmental change. However, plasticity may depend on interactions among parental environment, offspring environment and offspring sex, and we know little of how these interactions manifest. We examine the importance of parental and offspring thermal environment in the context of a terrestrial ectotherm (the jacky lizard, Amphibolurus muricatus), where the thermal environment depends on complex thermoregulatory behaviours. By manipulating both parental and offspring thermoregulatory (basking) opportunities in a full factorial design, we found that transgenerational plasticity was highly context dependent. Overall, longer parental thermoregulatory opportunities led to increased growth in offspring, providing a clear fitness benefit to daughters but inducing a cost of increased oxidative stress in sons. Daughters, but not sons, received the greatest advantage when their thermal environment matched that of their parents. The offspring thermal environment had little independent effect on offspring phenotype. Together, the results suggest that both directional selection on offspring size (leading to growth being dependent on thermal conditions) and selection for anticipatory parental effects operate, but with a different balance in males and females. More broadly, restrictions in thermoregulatory opportunities under climatic warming will have negative consequences both within and between generations, but the exact nature will depend on the evolved functional form of plasticity.

在环境变化的情况下，表型和适应性之间的关系会迅速改变，从而使人群易受伤害。世代相传和世代相传的可塑性可以最大程度地缓解环境变化。但是，可塑性可能取决于父母环境，后代环境和后代性别之间的相互作用，我们对这些相互作用如何表现还知之甚少。我们研究了陆地外温（杰基蜥蜴，Amphibolurus muricatus）的背景下父母和后代热环境的重要性。），其中热环境取决于复杂的温度调节行为。通过在完全因子设计中操纵父母和子女的体温调节（晒太阳）机会，我们发现跨代可塑性高度依赖于上下文。总体而言，更长的父母体温调节机会导致子代生长增加，为女儿提供明显的健身益处，但导致儿子氧化应激增加的代价。当女儿的温度与父母的温度相匹配时，女儿而非儿子会获得最大的优势。后代的热环境对后代的表型几乎没有独立的影响。一起，结果表明，对子代大小的定向选择（导致生长取决于热条件）和对预期的父母效应的选择均起作用，但雄性和雌性的平衡不同。更广泛地讲，气候变暖下的温度调节机会受到限制将在各代之间和各代之间产生负面影响，但确切的性质将取决于可塑性的演化功能形式。