Dr Sinead English - Long-term effects of the early-life and maternal environment: how common are they, and when are they adaptive?

Experiences in early development, even extending back to previous generations, can have lasting impacts into later life. Are these effects adaptive or do they reflect a non-adaptive 'scarring' of past experiences? I will present a theoretical model of how such long-term effects can evolve by considering the adaptive use of information during development. I then describe results from meta-analyses asking how general such effects are across systems, focusing on experiments which have manipulated the maternal environment and early-life nutrition. Finally, I will describe my current research investigating the potentially adaptive influence of mothers and the early environment on offspring traits in the viviparous tsetse fly.