Chickens exposed to prenatal maternal stress are more predictable in their behavioural response to anxious stimuli than non-stressed pen-mates

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-hi..., , , # Chickens exposed to prenatal maternal stress are more predictable in their behavioural response to anxious stimuli than non-stressed pen-mates

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k0p2ngfjr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k0p2ngfjr)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data and code in this folder belong to the study detailed in the manuscript \"Chickens exposed to prenatal maternal stress are more predictable in their behavioural response to anxious stimuli than non-stressed pen-mates\".

NOTE:

-The data has been processed for ease of use and analysis.

-All code and analysis were run and working under R version 4.4.0.

-Two files with data are provided in rds format to be imported into R:

Eggweights.data.rds.

PNMSPred.data.rds

-Package requirements to run the code are listed at the start of the code.

-Any custom function used in the analysis is included within the code.

### Files and variables

#### File: EggWeights.data.rds

**Description:** Contains information about ...,