Abstract
A major challenge in conservation physiology is to find out biomarkers that reliably reflect individual variation in wear and tear. Recent work has suggested that biomarkers of oxidative stress may provide an additional tool to assess the health state of individuals and to predict fitness perspectives. In this study, we assessed whether three biomarkers of plasma oxidative status predicted the following factors: (i) the resight probability as breeder in the next seasons; and (ii) the cumulative reproductive output over multiple years in Scopoli's shearwaters (Calonectris diomedea) using a 7 year individual-based data set. Our results show that shearwaters having higher levels of a marker of oxidative damage (reactive oxygen metabolites) in 2008 had a lower resight probability in the next years and a lower number of chicks raised from 2008 to 2014. In contrast, two biomarkers of antioxidant defences (non-enzymatic antioxidant capacity of plasma and thiols) did not have any predictive value. Increased concentrations of plasma reactive oxygen metabolites, together with the significant individual repeatability over time in this metric of oxidative stress found in numerous studies, suggest that this metric might serve as a blood-derived biomarker for health and fitness perspectives in birds and, possibly, also in other taxa.
Highlights
Within natural animal populations, individuals can differ dramatically in the degree to which they have accumulated or produced damage as a result of past experiences
Our results show that shearwaters having higher levels of a marker of oxidative damage in 2008 had a lower resight probability in the years and a lower number of chicks raised from 2008 to 2014
One of the major challenges in conservation physiology is to find out biomarkers that reliably reflect this individual variation in wear and tear and that may predict individual fitness perspectives (Bennett, 1987; Cooke et al, 2013; Beaulieu and Costantini, 2014; Dantzer et al, 2014)
Summary
Individuals can differ dramatically in the degree to which they have accumulated or produced damage as a result of past experiences. It is increasingly advocated that physiological biomarkers of stress may provide a valuable tool for long-term environmental monitoring programmes of natural animal populations to assess the effects of environmental changes on individual health and to predict how individuals will cope with these ongoing changes (Romero, 2004; Busch and Hayward, 2009; Cooke et al, 2013; Wingfield, 2013). Recent work has suggested that biomarkers of oxidative stress may provide an additional tool to assess the health state of individuals and to predict fitness perspectives, because they provide a more direct quantification of some aspects of tissue damage (Beaulieu and Costantini, 2014; Hau et al, 2015)
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