Positive feedback:
- The Daphnia-Pasteuria system is an interesting and appropriate system to study transgenerational effects. The fact that Daphnia is parthenogenic and produces clonal offspring is an amazing advantage that the authors utilize well in this study.
- Transmitting acquired traits, like immune memory, from parents to offspring is an exciting prospect. However, in this direct, single-generation transmission, there are many confounding factors. Parental infection could affect offspring in myriad ways, such as decreased offspring size to name only one. This is especially true in this system where the parasite directly influences host reproduction. It would be extremely interesting to see the authors extend this work into the F2 and F3 generations and determine if immune priming persists past the generation directly derived from the infected parent.
- The model applied in this study fits the data very well and is not the type of model typically considered by microbial ecologists. Other species interactions and specificity studies in different systems could benefit greatly by exploring the use of frailty mixed models as were adapted for this paper.