Meeting Abstract
Urban environments are expanding rapidly all over the world. While these new habitats seem to bring several benefits to some species, the extreme alterations of land use in cities put also new challenges to the wildlife living in these areas. Compared to rural environments, three main pollution sources, mainly associated with traffic and transportation networks, can be identified as major anthropogenic stressors in urban environments. Most focus has been on the effects of air pollutants (i.e. particulate matter), but also higher levels of noise related to traffic and human activities together with artificial light at night coming from street and park lights have been shown to influence the physiology. These stressors may not be directly lethal, but act through long-term effects causing shortened lifespan and/or reduction in fitness related traits, such as reproduction, growth and resistance to disease. However, the exact response mechanisms that are involved are not yet fully understood. Moreover, one major weakness with the current literature, is that studies on urbanization often confound multiple stressors and therefore clear conclusions about causality and possibly additive or synergistic effects cannot be drawn and appropriate precautions in urban environments not be made. In this experiment, we exposed captive zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) in a controlled exposure chamber to single and multiple combinations of these three pollutants and took repeated blood samples. We measured both damage and defence markers of oxidative stress in order to establish a direct causal relationship between single and multiple urban environmental stressors and avian health.
