Early life effects on adult life: Animals

Question 1

Why look at animals?

Answer 1

Only by considering animals in natural environments can we assess whether nature, given nurture, is adaptive.
- Scant evidence generally unsupportive of predictive adaptive responses AND tests of thrifty phenotype non-existent.
A pressing question is whether current conditions select animals to predict future environments - Understanding whether and how animals can adapt in behavioural time is essential, as we are changing the environment in almost every conceivable way.
- For example, climate change is leading to mismatches between predator and prey cycles.

Question 2

The medic-biologist mismatch

Answer 2

Clinical literature full of mal-adaptive consequences of early life environment – disease and death… not of much interest to evolutionary biologists studying adaptation, who are more interested in phenotypic plasticity and mitigation of poor conditions.

Question 3

Designing an experiment to test for a Predictive Adaptive Response.

Answer 3

• Chose your metric of early condition (food, density, competition, predation)
• Notice, most studies either increase or decrease ingredients, not both…think of Dutch and Leningrad famines.
• Can you manipulate both?
• How does your experiment isolate your ingredient, without impacting other possible ingredients?

Question 4

Correlational evidence for silverspoon

Answer 4

Reid et al. 2006 - Choughs - supportive of silver spoon, inconsistent with ‘matching’ hypothesis