Parental effects on animal personality

Abstract

Parental effects are any effect parents may have on the phenotype of their offspring over and above direct genetic transmission. By adaptively adjusting the phenotypes of their offspring to suit future environmental conditions, parents may increase their own fitness. A likely target of this parental programming is behavior, and the resulting variation in individual behavior can lead to diverse animal personalities. Here, I argue that parental effects may be an important source of variation in behavior and that by synthesizing the fields of parental effects and animal personality, we can gain novel insights into the ecological and evolutionary causes and consequences of individual variation. © The Author 2011.