Hair cortisol as a reliable indicator of stress physiology in the snowshoe hare: Influence of body region, sex, season, and predator-prey population dynamics
| Autor: | Stan Boutin, Rudy Boonstra, Yasmine N. Majchrzak, Gabriela F. Mastromonaco, Anandu Nair, Sophia G. Lavergne, Michael J. L. Peers |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Canada Hypothalamo-Hypophyseal System Hydrocortisone Population Population Dynamics Zoology 030209 endocrinology & metabolism Predation 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Endocrinology Stress Physiological medicine Animals education Predator 030304 developmental biology 0303 health sciences education.field_of_study Sex Characteristics biology Snowshoe hare biology.organism_classification Hares Glucocorticoid secretion Predatory Behavior Lynx Animal Science and Zoology Body region Female Seasons Moulting Glucocorticoid Biomarkers medicine.drug Hair |
| Zdroj: | General and comparative endocrinology. 294 |
| ISSN: | 1095-6840 |
| Popis: | Hair cortisol concentration is increasingly used as a convenient, non-invasive, and integrative measure of physiology and health in natural populations of mammals. However, the use of this index is potentially confounded by individual variation in body region-specific differences in cortisol deposition rates. Here we examine correlations in cortisol concentrations in hair collected from the ear, shoulder, and thigh of wild snowshoe hares, Lepus americanus, as well as the influence of sex on cortisol measurements. We further evaluated this technique’s ability to capture seasonal and cyclical patterns of snowshoe hare glucocorticoid secretion from 2013 to 2015 in the southwestern Yukon (Canada). We found positive correlations (R2 = 0.20–0.32) in all pairwise comparisons among body regions, and differences among individuals accounted for the greatest proportion of variance (47.3%) in measurements. From 2013 to 2015 the hares’ primary predator – Canada lynx – approximately doubled in population abundance. We found a significant increase in hare hair cortisol concentrations across this time period. Cortisol indices were higher in summer than winter pelage, reflecting predicted physiological responses to seasonal variation in food availability and individual risk. Variation in hair cortisol concentrations was more similar to long-term (weeks-months) integrative indices of adrenal capacity than point samples of fecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations. Overall, we find that hair cortisol analysis is a simple and useful tool for estimations of population-level stress physiology in wild mammals, and sampling of core body regions with consistent moulting patterns produced the most robust results in this species. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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