Meeting Abstract
Frogs, like all vertebrates, experience stressors through their developmental stages in life, including their free-living larval, or tadpole, stage. Studies across vertebrates have shown that stress effects the developmental processes that change the rate of age-specific transitions in early development, or in this case, metamorphosis. Increases in metabolic rate associated with faster metamorphosis in response to stressors are likely to lead to an increase in free radicals, and the potential for elevated oxidative damage. We are interested in antioxidant defense capabilities in tadpoles with the increase of stress in the environment. We manipulated stress levels of western chorus frog tadpoles by adding corticosterone to their water through their larval stage and determined total antioxidant capacity of the skin via swabbed samples of their skin surface. Using a subset of tadpoles given the same treatment as those in the experiment, we used a corticosterone enzyme immunoassay and confirmed that tadpoles with corticosterone added to their water had significantly higher corticosterone levels after 12, 24, and 48 hours than tadpoles that only received the ethanol control. Tadpoles given exogenous corticosterone developed significantly faster and had significantly lower total antioxidant capacity. Exploring these antioxidant levels in amphibians may reveal critical mechanisms by which amphibians maintain the health of their skin and costs associated with responding to stressors
