Adult Diet and Larval Diet Influence Survival Skills of Red Drum Larvae

Essential fatty acids, those that must come from either the larval or maternal diet, are required for normal growth and development. We manipulated adult diet to produce batches of eggs that varied in concentrations of essential fatty acids, including ARA and DHA, and then measured larval escape responses, routine swimming, growth, and survival. To evaluate whether effects of imbalances in maternally-derived fatty acids were irreversible, larvae reared from eggs with differing concentrations of essential fatty acids were fed four different diets that varied in essential fatty acid content.  Of the five traits that varied with egg fatty acid content, escape response latency and routine swimming speed were significantly reduced when larvae were fed an enriched larval diet, indicating that the larval diet can compensate for some effects of egg content. Turning rate and escape response distance did not change when larvae predicted to have low performance (based on egg composition) were fed an enriched diet, indicating that those effects of egg quality may be irreversible and caused by variations in adult diet. These results suggest that both maternal diet and larval diet may be important for our understanding of mechanisms behind larval survivorship and recruitment.