Effects of maternal age and environmental enrichment on learning ability and brain size

It is well known that maternal age at reproduction affects offspring lifespan and some other fitness-related traits, but it remains understudied whether maternal senescence affects how offspring respond to their environments. Early environment often plays a significant role in the development of an animal's behavioral phenotype. For example, complex environments can promote changes in cognitive ability and brain morphology in young animals. Here, we study whether and how maternal effect senescence influences offspring plasticity in cognition, group behavior, and brain morphology in response to environmental complexity. For this, juvenile 3-spined sticklebacks from young and old mothers (i.e. 1-yr and 2-yr-old) were exposed to different levels of environmental enrichment and complexity (i.e. none, simple, and complex), and their behavior, cognitive ability, and brain size were measured. Exposing fish to enriched conditions improved individual learning ability assessed by a repeated detour-reaching task, increased the size of the whole brain, and decreased aggressive interactions in the shoal. Maternal age did not influence the inhibitory control, learning ability, and group behavioral responses of offspring to the experimental environmental change. However, maternal age affected how some brain regions of offspring changed in response to environmental complexity. In offspring from old mothers, those exposed to the complex environment had larger telencephalons and cerebellums than those who experienced simpler environments. Our results suggest that maternal effect senescence may influence how offspring invest in brain functions related to cognition in response to environmental complexity.