Chronological age, biological age, and individual variation in the stress response in the European starling: A follow-up study
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Zoology
- Keywords
- biological age, stress response, corticosterone, developmental programming, starlings, telomeres
- Copyright
- © 2018 Gott et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Chronological age, biological age, and individual variation in the stress response in the European starling: A follow-up study. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27057v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27057v1
Abstract
The responsiveness of the avian stress system declines with age. A recently published study of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) found that a marker of biological age predicted stress responsiveness even in individuals of the same chronological age. Specifically, birds that had experienced greater developmental telomere attrition showed a lower peak corticosterone response to an acute stressor, and more rapid recovery of corticosterone levels towards baseline. Here, we performed a follow-up study using the same capture-restraint-handling stressor in a separate cohort of 27 starlings. Unlike the original study, we measured the response at two different age points (4 and 18 months). We did not replicate the associations with developmental telomere attrition observed in the previous study at either age point. However, a meta-analysis of the present results combined with those of the earlier study still lent some support to the conclusions of the earlier paper. Estimates of familial influence on stress responsiveness differed across the two age points. We found little evidence of individual consistency in stress responsiveness between 4 and 18 months. Peak corticosterone was significantly lower at the second age point than the first, though interpretation of this as age-related decline is problematic due to the samples having been analysed at different times.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.