ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Effects of resource variation during early life and adult social environment on contest outcomes in burying beetles: a context-dependent silver spoon strategy?
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Maternal Pheromone Emission During Biparental Care: Evidence for Consistent Individual Differences and Links to Terminal Investment.Journal of chemical ecology · 2026Article
- Consistent and flexible maternal effects: how the environments of a mother influence the offspring phenotype.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Size-based niche partitioning permits coexistence in natural populations of Nicrophorus spp.Environmental entomology · 2025Article
- Revisiting the ecology and evolution of burying beetle behavior (Staphylinidae: Silphinae).Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- The social formation of fitness: lifetime consequences of prenatal nutrition and postnatal care in a wild mammal population.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Spatiotemporal variation in the competitive environment, with implications for how climate change may affect a species with parental care.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- High-quality host plant diets partially rescue female fecundity from a poor early start.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Sex-specific influence of communal breeding experience on parenting performance and fitness in a burying beetle.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Nutrient Inputs Alleviate Negative Effects of Early and Subsequent Flooding on Growth ofFrontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Parental morph combination does not influence innate immune function in nestlings of a colour-polymorphic African raptor.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The influence of developmental diet on reproduction and metabolism in Drosophila.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- The developmental support hypothesis: adaptive plasticity in neural development in response to cues of social support.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- The Impact of Environmental Factors on the Efficacy of Chemical Communication in the Burying Beetle (Coleoptera: Silphidae).Journal of insect science (Online) · 2020Article
- Contribution of males to brood care can compensate for their food consumption from a shared resource.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Warmer temperature and provision of natural substrate enable earlier metamorphosis in the critically endangered Baw Baw frog.Conservation physiology · 2020Article
- Low food availability during gestation enhances offspring post-natal growth, but reduces survival, in a viviparous lizard.Oecologia · 2019Article
- The role of indirect genetic effects in the evolution of interacting reproductive behaviors in the burying beetle,Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Effects of variation in resource acquisition during different stages of the life cycle on life-history traits and trade-offs in a burying beetle.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- The developmental environment modulates mating-induced aggression and fighting success in adult femaleFunctional ecology · 2018Article
- Pheromones Regulating Reproduction in Subsocial Beetles: Insights with References to Eusocial Insects.Journal of chemical ecology · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Good early nutritional conditions may confer a lasting fitness advantage over individuals suffering poor early conditions (a 'silver spoon' effect). Alternatively, if early conditions predict the likely adult environment, adaptive plastic responses might maximize individual performance when developmental and adult conditions match (environmental-matching effect). Here, we test for silver spoon and environmental-matching effects by manipulating the early nutritional environment of Nicrophorus vespilloides burying beetles. We manipulated nutrition during two specific early developmental windows: the larval environment and the post-eclosion environment. We then tested contest success in relation to variation in adult social environmental quality experienced (defined according to whether contest opponents were smaller (good environment) or larger (poor environment) than the focal individual). Variation in the larval environment influenced adult body size but not contest success per se for a given adult social environment experienced (an 'indirect' silver spoon effect). Variation in post-eclosion environment affected contest success dependent on the quality of the adult environment experienced (a context-dependent 'direct' silver spoon effect). By contrast, there was no evidence for environmental-matching. The results demonstrate the importance of social environmental context in determining how variation in nutrition in early life affects success as an adult.
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