ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Paternal care in a fish: epigenetics and fitness enhancing effects on offspring anxiety.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Maternal glucocorticoids have persistent effects on offspring social phenotype irrespective of opportunity for social buffering.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Simple life, simple minds? How habitat simplification in aquatic ecosystems shape fish cognition.Animal cognition · 2026Review
- Developmental Behavioural Plasticity and DNA Methylation Patterns in Response to Predation Stress in Trinidadian Guppies.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Predator-induced transgenerational plasticity of parental care behaviour in male three-spined stickleback fish across two generations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Larval environmental conditions influence plasticity in resource use by adults in the burying beetle, Nicrophorus vespilloides.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Article
- Paternal care effects outweigh gamete-mediated and personal environment effects during the transgenerational estimation of risk in fathead minnows.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Who listens to mother? A whole-family perspective on the evolution of maternal hormone allocation.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2021Review
- The interplay between sperm-mediated and care-mediated paternal effects in threespine sticklebacks.Animal behaviour · 2021Article
- Threespine Stickleback: A Model System For Evolutionary Genomics.Annual review of genomics and human genetics · 2021Review
- Family-effects in the epigenomic response of red blood cells to a challenge test in the European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax, L.).BMC genomics · 2021Article
- Compassion: From Its Evolution to a Psychotherapy.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Creating a Compassionate World: Addressing the Conflicts BetweenFrontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- The role of variation and plasticity in parental care during the adaptive radiation of three-spine sticklebacks.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2019Article
- Looking back and moving forward: Evaluating and advancing translation from animal models to human studies of early life stress and DNA methylation.Developmental psychobiology · 2019Article
- The neural mechanisms and consequences of paternal caregiving.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2019Review
- Intergenerational Transmission of DNA Methylation Signatures Associated with Early Life Stress.Current genomics · 2018Review
- Personal and transgenerational cues are nonadditive at the phenotypic and molecular level.Nature ecology & evolution · 2018Article
- Like mother, like daughter: heritability of female Richardson's ground squirrelCurrent zoology · 2018Article
- Parenting behaviour is highly heritable in male stickleback.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In many animals, including humans, interactions with caring parents can have long-lasting effects on offspring sensitivity to stressors. However, whether these parental effects impact offspring fitness in nature is often unclear. In addition, despite evidence that maternal care can influence offspring behaviour via epigenetic alterations to the genome, it remains unclear whether paternal care has similar effects. Here, we show in three-spined sticklebacks, a fish in which fathers are the sole provider of offspring care, that the direct care provided by fathers affects offspring anxiety and the potential for epigenetic alterations to the offspring genome. We find that families are differentially vulnerable to early stress and fathers can compensate for this differential sensitivity with the quality of their care. This variation in paternal care is also linked to the expression in offspring brains of a DNA methyltransferase (Dnmt3a) responsible for de novo methylation. We show that these paternal effects are potentially adaptive and anxious offspring are unlikely to survive an encounter with a predator. By supplying offspring care, fathers reduce offspring anxiety thereby increasing the survival of their offspring-not in the traditional sense through resource provisioning but through an epigenetic effect on offspring behavioural development.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.