CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

For organisms with complex life histories it is well known that risk experienced early in life, as embryosor larvae, may have effects throughout the life cycle. Although carryover effects have been well docu-mented in invertebrates with different levels of parental care, there are few examples of predator-inducedresponses in externally brooded embryos. Here, we studied the effects of nonlethal predation riskthroughout the embryonic development of newly spawned eggs carried by female shrimp on the timingof egg hatching, hatchling morphology, larval development and juvenile morphology. We also deter-mined maternal body mass at the end of the embryonic period. Exposure to predation risk cues duringembryonic development led to larger larvae which also had longer rostra but reached the juvenile stagesooner, at a smaller size and with shorter rostra. There was no difference in hatching timing, but changesin larval morphology and developmental timing showed that the embryos had perceived waterbornesubstances indicative of predation risk. In addition to carryover effects on larval and juvenile stages, pre-dation threat provoked a decrease of body mass in mothers exposed to predator cues while brooding. Ourresults suggest that risk-exposed embryos were able to recognize the same infochemicals as their moth-ers, manifesting a response in the free-living larval stage. Thus, future studies assessing anti-predatorphenotypes should include embryonic development, which seems to determine the morphology anddevelopmental time of subsequent life-history stages according to perceived environmental conditions.