Meeting Abstract
Stress is known to affect the endocrinology, physiology and behaviour of a wide variety of animals. These responses may confound the results of scientific experiments or observations on captive study animals. The last few decades there has been an increased awareness of the importance of animal welfare and numerous studies have investigated stress and how to avoid it in model species such as small mammals, birds and even fish. Although many reptilian species are used as model species in various branches of biology, little is known on how they react to the stress induced by housing conditions or experimental treatments. One of the reasons for this neglect could be that it is difficult to assess stress levels in reptiles in an objective manner. In this study, we evaluated several methods of assessing stress in green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) and investigate how captive conditions influence these levels. Stress levels were gauged via behavioural and physiological measurements. Behaviour was scored via direct observations and time budgets were calculated. Physiological measurements included assessments of fecal corticosterone level, body condition, reflectance of the skin using photospectrometry and heterophil:lymphocyte ratio in the blood. We examined changes in response to three potential stressors: manipulation frequency, level of environmental enrichment and cage size. We hypothesize that a higher manipulation frequency, a lower level of enrichment and a smaller cage size will all lead to increased stress levels and concordant changes in behavioural and physiological indices.
