ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2015
When to rely on maternal effects and when on phenotypic plasticity?
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 197 citations in OpenAlex.
- Do Egg Hormones Have Fitness Consequences in Wild Birds? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Ecology letters · 2025Pooled it
- Parental effects influence life history traits and covary with an environmental cline in common frog populations.Oecologia · 2020Pooled it
- Trait-Specific Patterns of Phenotypic Differentiation Among Populations After Two Generations of Common-Garden Cultivation in a Wind-Pollinated Grass.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Individualised niches: an integrative conceptual framework across behaviour, ecology, and evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- How to Account for Past Selection When Maternal Effects Are Cascading.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Environmentally dependent developmental induction as a potential driver of heart evolution.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Parental thermal environment affects offspring resilience to winter and spring weather anomalies.Current research in insect science · 2026Article
- Transcriptomic basis of within- and trans-generational predator-induced plasticity in the freshwater snail Physa acuta.Heredity · 2025Article
- Local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity drive leaf trait variation in the California endemic toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia).American journal of botany · 2024Article
- Maternal developmental history alters transfer of circadian clock genes to offspring in Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica).Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2024Article
- Evolutionary rescue from climate change: male indirect genetic effects on lay-dates and their consequences for population persistence.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- The effects of maternal care on the developmental transcriptome and metatranscriptome of a wild bee.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Heat-induced maternal effects shape avian eggshell traits and embryo development and phenotype at high incubation temperatures.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Egg-mediated maternal effects in a cooperatively breeding cichlid fish.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Intergenerational response to sperm competition risk in an invasive mammal.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A generalised approach to the study and understanding of adaptive evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Maternal effects, paternal effects, and their interactions in the freshwater snail Physa acuta.Oecologia · 2023Article
- Heritable responses to stress in plants.Quantitative plant biology · 2023Review
- Parental methylation mediates how progeny respond to environments of parents and of progeny themselves.Annals of botany · 2022Article
- Vertical transmission of horizontally acquired social information in sticklebacks: implications for transgenerational plasticity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Existing insight suggests that maternal effects have a substantial impact on evolution, yet these predictions assume that maternal effects themselves are evolutionarily constant. Hence, it is poorly understood how natural selection shapes maternal effects in different ecological circumstances. To overcome this, the current study derives an evolutionary model of maternal effects in a quantitative genetics context. In constant environments, we show that maternal effects evolve to slight negative values that result in a reduction of the phenotypic variance (canalization). By contrast, in populations experiencing abrupt change, maternal effects transiently evolve to positive values for many generations, facilitating the transmission of beneficial maternal phenotypes to offspring. In periodically fluctuating environments, maternal effects evolve according to the autocorrelation between maternal and offspring environments, favoring positive maternal effects when change is slow, and negative maternal effects when change is rapid. Generally, the strongest maternal effects occur for traits that experience very strong selection and for which plasticity is severely constrained. By contrast, for traits experiencing weak selection, phenotypic plasticity enhances the evolutionary scope of maternal effects, although maternal effects attain much smaller values throughout. As weak selection is common, finding substantial maternal influences on offspring phenotypes may be more challenging than anticipated.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.