CAREER: Stress-mediated maternal effects as a facilitator of organismal resilience in fluctuating environments: from mechanisms to function

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Humans and animals alike experience changes in their surroundings. For wild animals, a failure to respond appropriately to those environmental fluctuations is a life or death situation. To date, most research on how animals can cope with changing environments has been a theoretical exercise. This project will integrate concepts from evolutionary biology, ecology, and animal physiology to critically evaluate how wild animals can adapt to fluctuations in their environment. It will use an experimental approach with wild North American red squirrels to evaluate if elevations in maternal stress levels enable pregnant females to induce changes in the physiology, behavior, and reproductive characteristics of offspring that enable them to better survive altered environments. From a broader perspective, this will aid the understanding of how early life stress can alter the physiology and behavior of mammalian offspring and if these effects are long-lasting; both of these are crucial questions in biomedical studies of humans. The educational activities of the project include crafting novel assessment methods to evaluate the effectiveness of undergraduate teaching in the behavioral sciences, the design of a new first-year undergraduate course in animal behavior to increase the retention of undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in the STEM pipeline, and development of a new graduate course that integrates concepts from evolutionary biology and neuroscience to better understand the biological and cultural origins of differences between females and males. The project will also engage public stakeholders by providing new training opportunities for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students and developing new after-school activities for elementary-aged students from underrepresented groups.Plasticity in behavior and characteristics associated with growth, reproduction, and survival (life history traits) may allow animals to persist through changing environments. Parental effects are a type of trans-generational phenotypic plasticity where the parental phenotype or environment induces plasticity of offspring characteristics. Parental effects could allow adaptive adjustments in offspring phenotype in anticipation of specific environments. Alternatively, the long-lasting changes in offspring physiology caused by parental effects could inhibit adaptive responses to changing environments. The main aim of this project is to identify why and how parental effects orchestrate changes in offspring phenotypes in wild North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) and determine whether they facilitate or constrain adaptation to changing environments. This project will use a series of field experiments combined with laboratory measures of physiological characteristics to address three specific knowledge gaps about parental effects: the mechanisms responsible for parental effects, their evolutionary consequences in nature, and how these consequences vary across environments and the sexes. This work will expand educational opportunities for students at multiple levels and develop a novel assessment method for tracking the effectiveness of animal behavior education for undergraduates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.