Phenotypic plasticity and selection in Drosophila life‐history evolution. I. Nutrition and the cost of reproduction

Abstract

Earlier experiments have shown that the evolution of postponed senescent populations can be achieved by selection on either demographic or stress resistance characters. Both types of selection have produced results in which survival characters (stress resistance and longevity) have apparently traded‐off against early‐life fecundity. Here we present the results of a series of experiments in which an environmental variable — the level of live yeast inoculate applied to the substrate — produces a qualitatively similar phenotypic response: longevity and starvation resistance are enhanced by lower yeast levels, at the expense of fecundity. For the starvation resistance versus fecundity experiments we show a negative and linear relationship between the norms of reaction for each character across a gradient of yeast levels. This phenotypic trade‐off is stable across the 20 populations and 4 selection treatments reported on here, and its general agreement with earlier selection results suggests that the evolutionary response and the phenotypically plastic response may share a common physiological basis. However, an important discrepancy in the lifetime fecundity data between the selection response and the dietary manipulations preclude strict analogy. The results broadly conform to a simple “Y‐model” of allocation, in which a limited resource is divided between survival and reproduction; here the characters are starvation resistance and longevity versus fecundity.