Environmental, Genetic, And Maternal Effects On Life-history Traits Of The Striped Ground Cricket, Allonemobius socius

Organismal fitness is affected by environmental and genetic factors. More importantly, an interaction between an individual's genotype and current environmental conditions influences the success of that individual in its environment. Significant geographic and environmental correlates of allele frequencies at the Idh-1 locus, combined with a significant genotype-by-environment (GxE) interaction between Idh-1 genotype and temperature that affected fitness of Allonemobius socius, support the hypothesis that allele distributions in this species are the result of natural selection on performance of different genotypes at different temperatures. Additionally, I found that an interaction between parental diapause history and egg-incubation temperature affected the proportion of diapause eggs produced by A. socius. Furthermore, the offspring of non-diapause parents were more likely to respond to the effects of temperature changes than were offspring of diapausing parents. The results of these studies suggest a complex interaction between genotype, maternal effects, and the environment affects fitness in this species.