Interplay of cooperative breeding and predation risk on egg allocation and reproductive output

Predation risk can influence behaviour, reproductive investment and, ultimately, individuals’ fitness. In high-risk environments, females often reduce allocation to reproduction, which can affect offspring phenotype and breeding success. In cooperative breeders, helpers contribute to feed the offspring, and groups often live and forage together. Helpers can therefore improve reproductive success, but also influence breeders’ condition, stress levels and predation risk. Yet, whether helper presence can buffer the effects of predation risk on maternal reproductive allocation remains unstudied. Here, we used the cooperatively breeding sociable weaver Philetairus socius to test interactive effects of predation risk and breeding group size on maternal allocation to clutch size, egg mass, yolk mass, and yolk corticosterone. We increased perceived predation risk before egg laying using playbacks of the adults’ main predator, gabar goshawk (Micronisus gabar). We also tested interactive effects ..., See Methods in \"Interplay of cooperative breeding and predation risk on egg allocation and reproductive output\"
Corresponding author: Rita Fortuna, [e-mail], [e-mail] , , # Data from: Interplay of cooperative breeding and predation risk on egg allocation and reproductive output

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rjdfn2zkk](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rjdfn2zkk)

These datasets contain results of an experiment aimed at increasing perceived predator presence, by playing back calls of a predator of adults, to test how this affects maternal allocation — clutch size, egg mass, yolk mass and yolk corticosterone — and reproductive output — hatching and fledging success. The study was conducted on the colonial cooperatively breeding sociable weaver (*Philetairus socius*), with the aim of assessing how breeding group sizes may modulate maternal allocation responses to predation risk.

This repository includes six datasets (see below), one R script that runs all analyses and produces figures included in the manuscript, called \"open_code_models.R\"; one file citing file sources and credits for calls used to build the playback tracks called \"XENOCANTO_Ref_GABAR_GOSHAW...