Adult hermaphrodites hedging their bets?

I was reading through Carol Trent’s thesis as one does I guess and it struck me that her description of the effect of starvation on egg laying (acute phase lowered eggs laid / minute vs. chronic ‘bag of worms’ phenotype) was actually a description of how C. elegans hedges its bets concerning the next generation.

Initially it seems, an adult hermaphrodite will lay very few eggs when placed on bacteria-free agar. Then, after about 40 minutes the adults start laying eggs at the same rate as their counterparts on OP50/NGM plates. Finally, the egg laying frequency of adults on bacteria-free agar appears to tail off (Carol Trent only follwed up to 90 minutes post-transfer) and the bag of worms phenotype seems to predominate.

So, after laying about 50 eggs, presumably with the ‘intention’ of these eggs perhaps hatching and the L1s finding food elsewhere…the adult keeps the rest inside (more or less) , thus ensuring that a proportion of the offspring have a packed lunch before they set off on their own journey.

Has anyone systematically documented these transitions…that is, do they always at the same post-transfer timepoint? What causes the worm on the bacteria-free plate to switch into ‘normal’ egg laying mode for a brief period before electing to keep the eggs and let them hatch inside?

Any thoughts…pointers to papers describing this would be most welcome.

Steve

Our lab has looked at this a little bit, although we really have no idea how much of this is a dedicated, real behavior vs. just what happens:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10950865

Thanks Kevin…I had read the Koelle lab paper. The baseline-fine tuning RGS proteins idea would fit well with adaptive changes induced by starvation (both inhibition and variable timing of egg laying).

Also, it would be interesting to dissect the role of temporal changes in humoral serotonin concentrations on the on food / off food signalling through Go/Gq…

Steve