Meeting Abstract
Global biodiversity is decreasing at an alarming rate and amphibians are at the forefront of this precipice. Many amphibians are negatively responding to environmental stressors, while some like habitat loss are easily recognized, many stressors are difficult to identify. An effective means to measure stress among individuals would facilitate identification of populations that may be chronically stressed and thus at risk. Increased plasma levels of glucocorticoids are often used as an indirect measure of a physiological stress response. Many amphibians are too small to extract plasma without lethality. Techniques such as assaying water borne or excrement hormone levels have been developed as less invasive measures of stress. We provide an alternative measurement of chronic stress in wild populations based on transcriptional biomarkers of chronic stress physiology. We subjected adult male Oklahoma Salamanders (Eurycea tynerensis) to two different temperatures in either corticosterone solution to simulate chronic physiological stress responses or filtered water as a control for 30 days. At the conclusion of the experiment, we biopsied tail tips, an often sampled tissue for genetic analysis. Transcriptomics of tail tips revealed differential up and down regulation of genes between both treatments. The identification of these genes could provide useful biomarkers for identification of wild populations experiencing chronic stress.
