Meeting Abstract
Bringing wild animals into captivity is a crucial aspect of studying stress physiology, as many experiments which are impractical in the wild can be easily performed in a lab environment. However, the mere act of capturing and housing these animals in an unnatural environment substantially alters their stress physiology, potentially in ways that may alter the outcomes of experiments. While most labs therefore employ habituation periods to allow the animals to become used to their new state, it is often the case that animals never fully return to their pre-captivity baseline glucocorticoid secretion patterns. Here we explored whether giving captive house sparrows (Passer domesticus) their feed by hiding it deep within a simulated artificial lawn would help to mitigate this early stressful period by giving the birds a task with which to occupy their time, one which mimics their normal feeding patterns in the environment from which they were captured. We observed no significant differences between the experimental and control groups in terms of glucocorticoid secretion patterns. We speculate that either the task is insufficiently diverting to reduce stress from captivity, or that the primary sources of captivity stress for this species arise from other environmental sources.
