Early-life stress as a potential resilience factor in king penguins

Abstract

Climate change-driven environmental variability can cause species to shift their phenology, leading to an increase in phenological mismatches. Whether the fitness cost of such mismatches can be mitigated by plasticity remains poorly understood, especially in the context of wild populations. In this study, we quantified responses to phenological mismatch using capture-mark-recapture, morphological, and transcriptomic data from king penguins hatching during and after the seasonal peak of food availability (i.e., born early and late in the breeding season, respectively). Late-born chicks showed reduced survival to fledging and fledged smaller and in slightly poorer body condition than chicks born during the seasonal peak in food availability. Yet post-fledging return rates did not differ between late- and early-born chicks, suggesting that early-life stress was effectively mitigated among individuals that survived to fledging, with no detectable carryover effects in the first years post-fledging. Genes involved in oxidative stress response, homeostasis, and nutrient-sensing were differentially expressed between early- and late-born chicks, consistent with stress mitigation and homeostasis maintenance at the expense of growth in late-born chicks. A co-expression gene cluster whose primary expression pattern was associated with hatching phenology also contained central genes involved in stress mitigation. Together, our findings highlight molecular mechanisms that buffer the fitness costs of phenological mismatch, which may allow species to tolerate mismatch to some extent. Despite higher winter mortality of individuals born in mismatch, the plastic response observed in survivors hints towards molecular adaptations that could allow species resilience under increasing climate-driven environmental unpredictability.