Data from: Rapid decline of prenatal maternal effects with age is independent of postnatal environment in a precocial bird

Maternal effects are an important source of phenotypic variation with
potentially large fitness consequences, but how their importance varies
with the quality of the environment across an individual’s ontogeny is
poorly understood. We bred Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) of known
pedigree and experimentally manipulated the quality of offspring diet to
estimate the importance of prenatal maternal effects in shaping variation
in body mass from hatching to adulthood. Maternal genetic effects on body
mass at hatching were strong, and largely caused by variation in egg mass,
but their importance rapidly declined with age. Whereas there was a large
effect of diet on growth, this did not affect the decline of maternal
effects variance. The importance of additive genetic and residual variance
increased with age, with the latter being considerably larger in the poor
diet treatment. Hence, we found no evidence for prenatal maternal effect
by postnatal environment interactions, and that prenatal maternal effects
are rapidly replaced by direct additive genetic and residual effects when
offspring start to develop outside the egg. Thereby these results shed new
light on the dynamics of the role of maternal versus offspring genes
across ontogeny and environments.