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

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.