Behavioural ecology meets oncology: quantifying the recovery of animal behaviour to a transient exposure to a cancer risk factor

Wildlife is increasingly exposed to sublethal transient cancer risk factors, including mutagenic substances, which activate their anti-cancer defences, promote tumourigenesis, and may negatively impact populations. Little is known about how exposure to cancer risk factors impacts the behaviour of wildlife. Here, we investigated the effects of a sublethal, short-term exposure to a carcinogen at environmentally relevant concentrations on the activity patterns of wild Girardia tigrina planaria during a two-phase experiment, consisting of a 7-day exposure to cadmium period followed by a 7-day recovery period. To comprehensively explore the effects of the exposure on activity patterns, we employed the double hierarchical generalized linear model framework which explicitly models residual intraindividual variability in addition to the mean and variance of the population. We found that exposed planaria were less active compared to unexposed individuals and were able to recover to pre-exposure ..., Description of the experiment
We used wild planaria (Girardia tigrina), a common freshwater invertebrate, as a study species to study how exposure to cancer risk factors may impact on animal behaviour, and individual behavioural variation at various hierarchical levels. For this purpose, we designed a 14-day-long two-phase experiment using planaria collected in the Saint Augustine Lagoon in September 2022 (Highton, Victoria, Australia, 38°11'30\"S, 144°18'48\"N).
To investigate the effects of cadmium exposure on behaviour, 60 planaria per treatment group were transferred into ten 6-well plates, with one individual per well, filled with either 10 mL of 0.5 ppm Cd2+ spring water water (Coles Natural Water Spring) solution (treatment group) or 10mL of spring water only (control group) and then placed in the dark in a 20°C incubator (Infors HT Ecotron) for seven days. On day eight of the experiment, the cadmium solution was replaced in both the control and the treatment group with 10 mL of cl..., , # Quantifying the recovery of animal behaviour (planaria) to a transient exposure to a cancer risk factor (cadmium).

To access comprehensive details about the protocol and the thorough rationale employed in gathering this dataset, kindly consult the publication referenced below:

Klaassen H et al. 2024 Behavioural ecology meets oncology: quantifying the recovery of animal behaviour to a transient exposure to a cancer risk factor. Proc. R. Soc. B 20232666.

## Description of the data and file structure

The \"planaria_raw_dataset.csv\" dataset is a .csv file of 8 columns and 1611 rows with variables as columns and measurements as rows. The first row of the dataset contains the name of each variables.

The variables are defined as followed:

**ID:** The individual ID code given to the planaria on which the activity measurement was collected (categorical variable)

**Day:** The day of the experiment ranging between 1 and 14 during which the activity measurement was collected (interval va...