Meeting Abstract
Continuously expanding human populations place extensive demands on society, with the needed homes and resource extraction operations causing a steady increase in the proportion of land either directly or indirectly impacted by humans. These anthropogenic effects do not limit themselves to terrestrial organisms. Industrial pollution, vehicles, and recreational activities often impact aquatic ecosystems in the vicinity of human development. Using painted turtles (C. picta picta) as a model organism, we seek to examine the effects of transitioning from a relatively rural environment to a heavily-impacted environment on physiological mediators such as the stress response and the immune system. We sampled and marked turtles at three locations in eastern Massachusetts: rural ponds in a nature preserve; a pond adjacent to a housing complex and a university; and previously rural ponds next to an ongoing housing development. Via analysis of corticosterone levels in blood and claw samples and of blood markers for health and immune function, we hope to track the physiological effects of the housing development on the turtles over several years. We present here preliminary results from the first season of research, including potential indicators of depressed immune function at the currently-urbanizing site, low calcium levels in both urban and urbanizing sites, and low or undetectable baseline corticosterone levels in all tested animals. We also note that all sites were afflicted by severe drought during the bulk of the sampling period, with substantial shrinkage of available habitat volumes.
