{"id":894,"date":"2018-08-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-15T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/evolution-maternal-stress-maladaptive-outcomes\/894\/"},"modified":"2019-12-14T19:55:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T19:55:48","slug":"evolution-maternal-stress-maladaptive-outcomes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/evolution-maternal-stress-maladaptive-outcomes\/894\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding the evolution of maternal stress effects and seemingly maladaptive outcomes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Michael Sheriff outlines how maternal stress effects may have evolved and explains seemingly maladaptive offspring responses.<\/h3>\n

Changes in the maternal phenotype can act as a signal to offspring about the future environment that they will encounter, and these cues can induce adaptive response in offspring phenotypes (e.g., behaviour, morphology, physiology). This phenomenon has been increasingly studied in animals in the context of maternal-stress effects, largely because maternal stress hormones that may induce changes in offspring traits is both measureable and amenable to experimental manipulations.<\/p>\n

The consequences of maternal stress have long been considered to be maladaptive in biomedical fields because offspring phenotypes that can occur in response to maternal stress (e.g., small size, slow growth, anxiety-like behaviour) are assumed to confer reduced fitness. However, researchers have recently proposed that maternal stress can play adaptive roles across a wide variety of animal taxa if stress-induced phenotypes better prepare offspring for a stressful post-natal environment.<\/p>\n

Despite this recent progress, there remains much controversy, particularly given that animals still seemingly have maladaptive responses (e.g., in lab rodents, a single stressful exposure during gestation results in a significant change in offspring traits in an otherwise benign lifetime environment). I, along with colleagues, have proposed a unified framework that both explains the selective mechanisms and allows field-testing of the adaptive role of maternal stress. This framework helps to explain seemingly maladaptive maternal-stress induced trait changes in offspring.<\/p>\n

The adaptive potential of maternal stress<\/h3>\n

The ecology of maternal stress has been an active area of recent research, yet the traditional biomedical view that maternal stress generates negative outcomes for both mothers and offspring (i.e., is maladaptive) often still prevails. To move this field ahead in a productive manner, three critical points must be considered prior to assigning any hypothetical adaptive or maladaptive value to maternal-stress effects:<\/p>\n