Scientists commonly analyze the stress hormones found in
scat to evaluate the impact of environmental disturbances on animal health
looking, for example, at the effect of logging on owls, ecotourism on mountain
gorillas, and shipping traffic on right whales.
One past assumption
held that stress hormone levels found in individuals are representative of
their species.
But findings show that glucocorticoid (GC) stress hormone
levels can vary due to factors such as sex, age, and reproductive phase.
Julia Greenberg is
using 20 years of data collected by the Mara Hyena Project to test the limits
of fecal GC stress level measurements, and look for long-term patterns.
She wanted to know:
Could GCs be used to show general stress trends in an animal population to help
improve wildlife management planning?
So far, she has found that individual hyenas, with high
fecal GC levels early in life, don’t live as long.
On the other hand, she could not correlate early
high GC levels with reproductive success later in life.
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