Meeting Abstract
Environmental stressors, such as extreme temperature change, invasive predators, and other disturbances, can negatively affect an organism’s performance, survival, growth rate, and ultimately its fitness. The underlying molecular mechanisms of how organisms respond to diverse stressors are still poorly understood. Sceloporus undulatus, the eastern fence lizard, has become an ecological model organism for addressing questions in ecophysiology, and life history evolution. Recently we have developed a high-quality reference genome that furthers its utility for investigating molecular and physiological mechanisms. We are interested in understanding how stress responses may vary when an organism is exposed to diverse environmental stressors such as an extreme heat event as predicted by climate change, or attack by an invasive predator such as a fire ant. In this study, we test whether stress response to either acute heat or fire ant attack diverges at the endocrine level (plasma corticosterone levels) or at the gene expression level. We found that male S. undulatus (n = 24) who were either exposed to heat (43C) for up to 3 hours or fire ant envenomation (receiving ~10 stings) each had the same response in corticosterone levels, with an increase relative to the control. Liver RNA seq data are being analyzed to test whether the gene expression response to acute heat and fire ant envenomation is also highly similar or is divergent. These results will bring further insight into the similarity of molecular responses to ecologically relevant stressors.
