1. Maternal environmental effects create lagged population responses to past environments. Although they are ubiquitous and vary in expression across taxa, it remains unclear if and how their presence alters competitive interactions in ecological communities.
2. Here, we use a discrete-time competition model to simulate how maternal effects alter competitive dynamics in fluctuating and constant environments. Further, we explore how omitting maternal effects alter estimates of known model parameters from observational time series data.
3. Our simulations demonstrate that (i) maternal effects change competitive outcomes, regardless of whether competitors otherwise interact neutrally or exhibit non-neutral competitive differences, (ii) the consequences of maternal effects for competitive outcomes are mediated by the temporal structure of environmental variation, (iii) even in constant conditions, competitive outcomes are influenced by species' maternal effects strategies, and (iv) in observational time series data, omitting maternal effects reduces variation explained by models and biases parameter estimates, including competition coefficients.
4. Our findings demonstrate that the ecological consequences of maternal effects hinge on the competitive environment. Evolutionary biologists have long recognized that maternal effects can be an important but often overlooked strategy buffering populations from environmental change. We suggest that maternal effects are similarly critical to ecology and call for research into maternal effects as drivers of dynamics in populations and communities.

中文翻译：

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母体效应和种间竞争的结果

1. 母体环境影响导致人口对过去环境的反应滞后。尽管它们无处不在并且在整个分类群中的表达各不相同，但它们的存在是否以及如何改变生态群落中的竞争相互作用仍不清楚。
2. 在这里，我们使用离散时间竞争模型来模拟母体效应如何在波动和恒定的环境中改变竞争动态。此外，我们探索了忽略母体效应如何改变观察时间序列数据中已知模型参数的估计。
3. 我们的模拟表明，（i）母体效应改变竞争结果，无论竞争对手是否以其他方式中性互动或表现出非中性竞争差异，（ii）母体效应对竞争结果的影响是由环境变化的时间结构介导的，（ iii) 即使在恒定条件下，竞争结果也会受到物种母体效应策略的影响，并且 (iv) 在观察时间序列数据中，省略母体效应会减少模型解释的变化和偏差参数估计，包括竞争系数。
4. 我们的研究结果表明，母体效应的生态后果取决于竞争环境。进化生物学家早就认识到，母体效应可能是一种重要但经常被忽视的策略，可以缓冲环境变化对种群的影响。我们建议孕产妇效应对生态学同样至关重要，并呼吁将孕产妇效应作为人口和社区动态的驱动因素进行研究。