Dietary vitamin D in female rock lizards induces condition-transfer effects in their offspring

One way that maternal effects may benefit the offspring is by informing them about the characteristics of the environment. Through gestation, environmentally induced maternal effects might promote in the offspring-specific behavioral responses like dispersal or residence according to their new habitat characteristics. Females of the Carpetan rock lizard (Iberolacerta cyreni) seem to choose their home ranges using the smell of provitamin D3 in scent marks produced by males. Here, we supplemented gravid females of I. cyreni with dietary provitamin D3 or vitamin D3 to examine whether these food resources, also associated with the scent of males, affect the motivation to disperse and the locomotor performance of their offspring. Our results suggest that the supplementary availability of the resource (vitamin D3) to mothers may provoke condition-transfer maternal effects that motivate the residence or the dispersal of the offspring in their postnatal habitat. Thus, hatchlings of supplemented females had a lower dispersal trend in spite of having a greater climbing ability than hatchlings from nonsupplemented females. This suggests that the levels of provitamin D3 and vitamin D3 inside the body of the mother could act as an informative compound of the habitat quality for the offspring.