Maternal plasticity in pre-natal (egg volume) and post-natal (nestling provisioning rate) investment according to female helper numbers.

(a) Female helper number positively predicts egg volume at the population level (Table 1; prior to partitioning variation in helper number). (b) Within-mother variation in female helper number (“Δ female helper number”) also positively predicts egg volume, providing evidence of maternal plasticity (see Results, Tables 2 and S5). (c) Female helper number negatively predicts maternal nestling provisioning rate at the population level (Table 3). (d) Within-mother variation in female helper number (“Δ female helper number”) also negatively predicts maternal nestling provisioning rate, providing evidence of maternal plasticity (see Results, Tables 4 and S11). Gray dots illustrate raw data points, and red lines present model predictions (± SE). The data underlying this figure can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8385995.