Question

What will happen to the offsprings when an organism changes its body size during starvation?

Answer 1

A growing body of evidence is pointing towards unknown inheritance mechanisms that are influenced by what happens during an organism's life. Last summer, I wrote about how crickets whose mother had met a predator were more cautious, and in December the inimitable Virginia Hughes did an amazing job of covering the story about mice inheriting a memory of fear. Now researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York and Tel Aviv University have shown how starvation can cause inherited changes in several generations of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans even though their DNA stays the same.