Parental diet alters thermal reaction norms of offspring development

The environment can alter the physiological condition of parents during reproduction, resulting in variation in energy allocation that can affect offspring performance. In addition, differences in energy allocation can affect how offspring respond to their own environmental heterogeneity. Consequently, specific parental effects can alter the developmental plasticity of offspring when both parents and offspring experience environmental variation. In this study, we assess how offspring developmental plasticity is affected by parental allocation using a breeding colony of brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) that varied in their caloric intake. Mothers fed a high-food diet laid larger eggs and were more fecund than mothers fed a low-food diet. Embryos from these mothers were then incubated across a range of ecologically relevant developmental temperatures. The reaction norm of hatchling body size, a trait crucial for fitness across ontogeny, differed between eggs laid from high-food and low-food mothers, suggesting that parental effects alter the developmental plasticity of offspring. This effect might be driven by the combination of an energetic constraint on reproduction and a thermodynamic constraint on development. Our results suggest that environmental variation experienced by previous generations affects the capacity of future generations to respond to their own environments.