Maternal effects and the outcome of interspecific competition

Abstract Maternal environmental effects create lagged population responses to past environments. Although they are ubiquitous and vary in expression across taxa, it remains unclear if and how their presence alters competitive interactions in ecological communities. Here, we use a discrete‐time competition model to simulate how maternal effects alter competitive dynamics in fluctuating and constant environments. Further, we explore how omitting maternal effects alter estimates of known model parameters from observational time series data. Our simulations demonstrate that (i) maternal effects change competitive outcomes, regardless of whether competitors otherwise interact neutrally or exhibit non‐neutral competitive differences, (ii) the consequences of maternal effects for competitive outcomes are mediated by the temporal structure of environmental variation, (iii) even in constant conditions, competitive outcomes are influenced by species' maternal effects strategies, and (iv) in observational time series data, omitting maternal effects reduces variation explained by models and biases parameter estimates, including competition coefficients. Our findings demonstrate that the ecological consequences of maternal effects hinge on the competitive environment. Evolutionary biologists have long recognized that maternal effects can be an important but often overlooked strategy buffering populations from environmental change. We suggest that maternal effects are similarly critical to ecology and call for research into maternal effects as drivers of dynamics in populations and communities.