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Behavioural predictability in chickens in response to anxiogenic stimuli is influenced by maternal corticosterone levels during egg formation

Stingo-Hirmas, Diego1; Rönnegård, Lars2; Cunha, Felipe1; Wright, Dominic1; Henriksen, Rie1

Published Mar 11, 2025; Updated Sep 19, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k0p2ngfjr

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Mar 11, 2025 version files 24.48 KB
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Abstract

Across species, prenatal maternal stress has been shown to create heterogeneity in behavioural phenotypes. Recently research has highlighted that individuals vary in how predictable they are in their behavioural responses. This within-individual variation in behaviour is likely to be of biological importance, since individuals interact with the world not only through their mean behavioural phenotype, but also through their extremes. Yet, the underlying mechanism that creates and constraints between individual variation in behavioural predictability remains largely unexplored. Here we estimate if prenatal maternal stress can cause variation in behavioural predictability in a population of chickens, by quantifying offsprings behaviour repeatedly (16 times) in a standard anxiety test (open-field test). Prenatal maternal stress resulted in less anxious and more predictable individuals than control individuals. Demonstrating for the first time that prenatal maternal stress underlies multi-hierarchical behavioural plasticity by influencing both the magnitude of the behavioural response as well as the predictability of the behavioural response. These results not only expand our current knowledge about the ways prenatal stress can affect behavioural phenotypes but also suggest a possible proximate mechanism underlying within population variation in individual behavioural predictability.