Meeting Abstract

48.4  Thursday, Jan. 6  Stress and immunity in a free-living lizard across an urban landscape LUCAS, L.D.*; FRENCH, S.S.; Utah State University; Utah State University leilani.lucas@usu.edu

Urbanization changes the landscape of an organism’s environment, presenting them with different challenges and novel stimuli unlike those which would be typically experienced by their non-urban counterparts. Prior work has helped to elucidate how urbanization can affect organisms on an individual level, revealing mechanisms that may initiate observed population trends in response to such perturbations. One key physiological pathway commonly used as an indicator of an individual’s ability to cope with environmental stressors, such as those imposed by urbanization, is the vertebrate stress response. By increasing circulating glucocorticoids (i.e. corticosterone) the stress response can exert a suite of physiological effects, such as by altering immune function. We investigated the effects of urbanization in St. George, Utah on corticosterone in response to restraint stress, as well as bacterial killing ability in populations of common side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana). We sampled four populations (two urban and two rural) in order to determine if urbanization exerts any effects on the stress response and immune function of this species, and if so, the direction of those effects. Investigating individual physiological effects is an important first step to understanding how urbanization may contribute to observed population level changes.