Data from: Paternal care in a fish: epigenetics and fitness enhancing effects on offspring anxiety

In many animals, including humans, interactions with caring parents can
have long-lasting effects on offspring sensitivity to stressors. However,
whether these parental effects impact offspring fitness in nature is often
unclear. In addition, despite evidence that maternal care can influence
offspring behaviour via epigenetic alterations to the genome, it remains
unclear whether paternal care has similar effects. Here, we show in
three-spined sticklebacks, a fish in which fathers are the sole provider
of offspring care, that the direct care provided by fathers affects
offspring anxiety and the potential for epigenetic alterations to the
offspring genome. We find that families are differentially vulnerable to
early stress and fathers can compensate for this differential sensitivity
with the quality of their care. This variation in paternal care is also
linked to the expression in offspring brains of a DNA methyltransferase
(Dnmt3a) responsible for de novo methylation. We show that these paternal
effects are potentially adaptive and anxious offspring are unlikely to
survive an encounter with a predator. By supplying offspring care, fathers
reduce offspring anxiety thereby increasing the survival of their
offspring—not in the traditional sense through resource provisioning but
through an epigenetic effect on offspring behavioural development.