Mechanisms and Consequences of Water Stress–Induced Parental Effects in an Invasive Annual Grass
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Premise of research. Tests of the adaptive value of parental effects have generally focused on offspring fitness. However, the evolution of parental effects depends on their consequences for both offspring and parental fitness. Whether parental effects are adaptive can also depend on the mechanism of these effects. Parental effects caused by differences in the quality rather than quantity of resources provisioned to offspring may be more likely to be adaptive because they can persist through the life cycle.Methodology. We estimated parental effects in response to water stress in the invasive annual Avena barbata. To test whether these effects were adaptive, we reciprocally transplanted offspring of wet- and dry-grown parents into wet and dry environments. We also tested whether seed size and nitrogen content, which represent the quantity and quality of parental investment, were mechanisms of parental effects in A. barbata.Pivotal results. We found evidence of parental effects in response to water stress in A. barbata; dry-grown parents produced offspring with significantly higher germination, longer radicles, and earlier emergence than wet-grown parents. The offspring of dry-grown parents had higher biomass and seed production than the offspring of wet-grown parents. However, when cumulative fitness was calculated across parental and offspring generations, dry-grown parents had significantly lower fitness than wet-grown parents because of trade-offs between seed size and number. Although dry-grown parents provisioned their offspring with more nitrogen than wet-grown parents, offspring performance was primarily explained by variation in seed mass.Conclusions. Water stress–induced parental effects were adaptive from the offspring but not the parental perspective, suggesting that the evolution of these effects may be constrained. In addition, water stress–induced parental effects were primarily caused by differences in seed mass, suggesting that the quantity of resources provisioned to offspring is a more important mechanism of parental effects than resource quality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".