Parasitism across generations: maternal effects on susceptibility

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The condition of a mother, say, how healthy she is, will not only affect her, but also her offspring. Such maternal effects are increasingly recognised to play a role in the probability that offspring will succumb to infectious disease. However, independent of these maternal effects, a mother will also pass genes to her offspring. Thus, there are two reasons an offspring could be highly susceptible: maternal effects and genes (or some combination). This project aims to understand how these two effects work together to make offspring either susceptible or resistant, and, further, we want to understand how populations might change (evolve) in this regard. The sort of fundamental experiments required would be difficult to do in a human or a mouse, and so we have designed experiments with a small, easy to manipulate crustacean, Daphnia. The project will: 1) illustrate how maternal condition (say, stress) affects offspring resistance; 2) determine if these maternal effects are costly, for example, do they accelerate the aging process; 3) study how maternal effects differ depending on the genes of the mother; 4) determine how maternal effects evolve in nature as a consequence of parasite epidemics