Meeting Abstract

P2.125  Tuesday, Jan. 5  Short- and long-term consequences of yolk steroid exposure for green anole lizards SARGENT, ML*; LOVERN, MB; Oklahoma State University; Oklahoma State University michelle.sargent@okstate.edu

Maternal effects can influence progeny in myriad ways; one pathway for such effects is hormone transfer from mother to offspring. In oviparous species, steroids including testosterone (T) and corticosterone (CORT) are transferred to the yolk during egg formation, where they may have both short- and long-term consequences for offspring. Although short-term effects have been amply demonstrated, few studies have followed offspring into adulthood to determine long-term effects. We document baseline hatching success, growth, and behavior of a laboratory colony of green anole lizards, Anolis carolinensis, and we compare these results to those obtained for lizards raised and housed identically but exposed to experimentally elevated levels of yolk steroids. We demonstrate that we can successfully maintain lizards from egg to adulthood that exhibit high survival and sex-typical growth and behavior. Males and females hatched and raised in the laboratory in 2008 obtained reproductive competence in 2009; we currently are raising the offspring that resulted from those eggs. In 2009, we applied 5 µl of either 95% ethanol alone or 95% ethanol containing 5 µg of T or CORT to the surface of freshly oviposited eggs collected from wild-caught females; we also left some eggs untreated. Compared to untreated, ethanol-treated, and T-treated eggs, CORT-treated eggs took significantly longer to incubate and produced significantly smaller hatchlings; hatching success for CORT-treated eggs also was significantly lower (30% vs. 82-83% for the other groups). We additionally will provide data on sex-specific survival, growth, and behavior of these juveniles to determine the extent to which embryonic exposure to T or CORT may produce long-lasting effects on offspring phenotype.