Maternal predator-exposure has life-long consequences for offspring learning in threespined sticklebacks

Learning is an important form of phenotypic plasticity that allows organisms to adjust their behaviour to the environment. An individual’s learning performance can be affected by its mother’s environment. For example, mothers exposed to stressors such as restraint and forced swimming often produce offspring with impaired learning performance. However, it is unclear whether there are maternal effects on offspring learning when mothers are exposed to ecologically relevant stressors such as predation risk. Here, we examined whether maternal predator-exposure affects adult offsprings’ learning of a discrimination task in threespined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus). Mothers were either repeatedly chased by a model predator (predator-exposed) or not (unexposed) while producing eggs. Performance of adult offspring from predator-exposed and unexposed mothers was assessed in a discrimination task that paired a particular coloured chamber with a food reward. Following training, all offsprin...