Data from: The transgenerational consequences of paternal social isolation and predation exposure in threespined sticklebacks

Parents routinely encounter stress in the ecological environment that can
affect offspring development (transgenerational plasticity: TGP); however,
parents’ interactions with conspecifics may alter how parents respond to
ecological stressors. During social buffering, the presence of
conspecifics can reduce the response to or increase the speed of recovery
from a stressor. This may have cascading effects on offspring if
conspecifics can mitigate parental responses to ecological stress in ways
that blunt the transmission of stress-induced transgenerational effects.
Here, we simultaneously manipulated both paternal social isolation and
experience with predation risk prior to fertilization in threespined
stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus). We generated offspring via in-vitro
fertilization to allow us to isolate paternal effects mediated via sperm
alone (i.e., in the absence of paternal care). If social buffering
mitigates TGP induced by paternal exposure to predation risk, then we
expect the transgenerational effects of predation exposure to be weaker
when a conspecific is present compared to when the father is isolated.
Offspring of predator-exposed fathers showed reduced anxiety-like behavior
and tended to be captured faster by the predator. Fathers who were
socially isolated also had offspring that were captured faster by a live
predator, suggesting that paternal social isolation may have maladaptive
effects on how offspring respond to ecological stressors. Despite additive
effects of paternal social isolation and paternal predation risk, we found
no evidence of an interaction between these paternal treatments,
suggesting that the presence of a conspecific did not buffer fathers
and/or offspring from the effects of predation risk. Our results suggest
that socially-induced stress is an important, yet underappreciated,
mediator of TGP and can elicit transgenerational effects even in species
that do not form permanent social groups. Future studies should therefore
consider how the parental social environment can affect both within and
trans-generational responses to ecological stressors.