Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Annie Poll, Dr Clare Andrews, Professor Melissa BatesonORCiD, Professor Daniel Nettle
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright 2018 Gott et al. The strength of the avian stress response declines with age. A recently published study of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) found that a marker of biological age predicted the strength of the stress response even in individuals of the same chronological age. Specifically, birds that had experienced greater developmental telomere attrition (DTA) showed a lower peak corticosterone (CORT) response to an acute stressor, and more rapid recovery of CORT levels towards baseline. Here, we performed a follow-up study using the same capture-handling-restraint stressor in a separate cohort of starlings that had been subjected to a developmental manipulation of food availability and begging effort. We measured the CORT response at two different age points (4 and 18 months). Our data suggest a decline in the strength of the CORT response with chronological age: peak CORT was lower at the second age point, and there was relatively more reduction in CORT between 15 and 30 min. Individual consistency between the two age points was low, but there were modest familial effects on baseline and peak CORT. The manipulation of begging effort affected the stress response (specifically, the reduction in CORT between 15 and 30 min) in an age-dependent manner. However, we did not replicate the associations with DTA observed in the earlier study. We meta-analysed the data from the present and the earlier study combined, and found some support for the conclusions of the earlier paper.
Author(s): Gott A, Andrews C, Hormigos ML, Spencer K, Bateson M, Nettle D
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: PeerJ
Year: 2018
Volume: 6
Online publication date: 23/10/2018
Acceptance date: 27/09/2018
Date deposited: 14/11/2018
ISSN (electronic): 2167-8359
Publisher: PeerJ Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5842
DOI: 10.7717/peerj.5842
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
