Trends in Ecology & Evolution
OpinionTransgenerational Plasticity in Human-Altered Environments
Section snippets
Considering Transgenerational Plasticity in the Context of Human-Induced Rapid Environmental Change
Humans are profoundly affecting the global abundance and distribution of organisms by facilitating habitat loss and fragmentation [1], introducing exotic species [2], overharvesting wild populations [3], increasing pollutant exposure [4], and altering the global climate [5]. While some species (e.g., invasive species, commensal pests) have been successful [6] under human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) (see Glossary) [7], other species exhibit maladaptive responses that contribute to
How HIREC Alters Environments in Ways That May Influence the Benefits of TGP
TGP is likely to be beneficial if: (i) parents can detect and identify current environmental conditions, (ii) parental environments accurately predict offspring environments, and (iii) parents can accurately transmit information to offspring so that it can be integrated into offspring phenotypes [17]. Here, we outline a framework that highlights how HIREC is likely to produce errors in one or more of these processes if HIREC produces a mismatch between current environmental conditions and
Overall Fitness Consequences of HIREC-Induced TGP
HIREC will likely reduce parents’ ability to detect and assess their own environment, alter historical relationships in the degree of autocorrelation between parental and offspring environments, and limit the accuracy of information transmission and reception between parents and offspring. Because errors can occur at each stage, we argue that TGP is especially prone to errors compared with WGP, which may have severe consequences for offspring fitness in human-altered environments.
If parents
Concluding Remarks
HIREC is likely to make TGP maladaptive if it alters one or more of the conditions that made TGP adaptive in historical environments. As environments become more variable and unpredictable, TGP may facilitate species declines, at least until parents can evolve mechanisms to better detect novel environmental conditions or evolve novel TGP pathways to more accurately convey information about novel environmental conditions to offspring (see Outstanding Questions). However, TGP may also allow rapid
Acknowledgments
We thank M. Bensky for creating the images for Figure 1 and S. Gignoux-Wolfsohn, R. Fletcher, and three anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments that improved the manuscript. While writing the manuscript, J.K.H. was supported by a National Institutes of Health NRSA fellowship (award #F32GM121033), S.C.D. was supported by a Smithsonian Institutional Postdoctoral Fellowship, A.M.B. was supported by NSF IOS-1121980 and 191100 and NIH 2R01GM082937-06A1, B.L. was supported by NSF
Glossary
- Autocorrelation
- similarity between environmental conditions in a temporal or spatial series.
- Cue reliability
- how well environmental cues reflect environmental conditions.
- Diversified bet hedging (DBH)
- when parents increase phenotypic variance in their offspring to lower the variance in genotypic fitness; can be a type of TGP if the parents’ environment modifies offspring phenotypic variation.
- Ecological trap
- a type of evolutionary trap; when organisms choose a suboptimal habitat, even though there is
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These authors contributed equally to this work