Meeting Abstract
Any organism unable to maintain homeostasis undergoes stress. Nutrition, anthropogenic disturbances and predation are all factors that have previously been shown to cause stress in wild mammals. In addition to disturbances directly linked to human contact (e.g., hunting, capture and handling) and habitat lost, the recent rise in reported infectious disease emergence in wildlife and in humans has raised global concern. While stress has been linked to increased disease susceptibility (cattle shipping fever, and colds/herpes in humans), whether infections actually contribute to physiological stress in animals is unknown. Quantifying the stress that an animal is experiencing thus represents an immediate measure of the physiological response to changes in its environment, and a prospective assessment of the animal’s health and well being. Here we tested whether infectious diseases affected stress in a free-ranging population of African buffalo. We measured both acute and chronic infections by viral, bacterial pathogens and parasites. Acute, but not chronic infections were stressful. As well as low body condition, dry years and the mating season. This is to our knowledge the first study to show infectious diseases cause stress in a wildlife population; and that is important because it could set up a negative feedback cycle between stress and infectious diseases, putting already struggling populations at increased risk/reducing their viability.
