Apt to future conditions, we need to employ experiments investigating theApt to future conditions, we

Apt to future conditions, we need to employ experiments investigating the
Apt to future conditions, we need to employ experiments investigating the importance of the early and late life environments. A number of experimental approaches have been used to pursue this aim, which follow a common general pattern. They provide organisms with two or more different environmental cues or conditions at an early developmental stage, either through the influence of parents or directly, and they test their performance at some later KF-89617 dose life-stage in conditions that are either correlated or uncorrelated with the early conditions. Most experiments on developmental plasticity follow one of the five designs depicted in Fig. 1. These approaches differ in the strength of inference that can be made with respect to the causal mechanisms of plasticity and its ultimate function. The strongest inference on the possible beneficial or detrimental effects of developmental plasticity can be made from full factorial experiments where early and late environments are manipulated reciprocally (Fig. 1a). Here PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27484364 both early and late environments are varied such that half of the experimental individuals are kept under identical conditions early and later in life, and the other half is switched between environments at the onset of the later-life treatment. By this reciprocalGroothuis and Taborsky Frontiers in Zoology 2015, 12(Suppl 1):S6 http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/12/S1/SPage 6 ofFigure 1 Schematic overview of five experimental designs to test developmental plasticity. The different colours of the large circles represent different environments. The small circles represent behavioural tests conducted within such an environment and which are aimed to represent tests related to the rearing environment. (a) Full cross-over design in which the control and experimental groups are split after initial rearing and further reared divided over both environments in a complete match-mismatch design. (b) Organisms are reared in either of two conditions, then transferred to a new condition (often standard housing and considered to be a “neutral” condition), in which the performance of both groups is measured by tests designed to reflect elements form the rearing environment. (c) After being reared in either of the two conditions, both groups are transferred to the same “neutral” holding condition, in which the performance of both groups are analysed without specific testing. (d) as in (c) but groups are transferred to only one condition (often the control condition). (e) As in (b), but here the performance later in life is analysed only by one common test in one condition (here, a condition related only to the experimental condition).design it is possible to distinguish, for instance, interacting effects of early and late environment as expected by the match-mismatch hypothesis (Fig. 2a) from additive effects as they occur in the presence of carry-over effects (Fig. 2b). To get even closer to a relevant fitness estimate, reciprocal experiments should ideally be done under field conditions that is, in the presence of all important selective forces (see [44] for an excellent example in plants). For instance, [45] manipulated prenatal and postnatal food availability during both egg laying and the nestling stage. One of the interaction effects they found was that food supplemented chicks grew largest when their mothers were not supplemented during egg laying, suggesting that mothers had prepared their chicks via egg composition to use food resources more.