Abstract
Fish repeatedly experience stressful situations under experimental and aquaculture conditions, even in their natural habitat. Fish submitted to sequential stressors can exhibit accumulation or habituation on its cortisol response. We posed a central question about the cortisol response profiles after exposure to successive acute stressors of a similar and different nature in Rhamdia quelen. We have shown that successive acute stressors delivered with 12-h, 48-h, and 1-week intervals provoked similar cortisol responses in juvenile R. quelen, without any habituation or accumulation. The cumulative stress response is more associated to short acute stressors with very short intervals of minutes to hours. In our work, we used an interval as short as 12h, and no cumulative response was found. However, if the length of time between stressors is of a day or week as used in our work the most common and an expected phenomenon is the attenuation of the response. Thus, also, the absence of both accumulation of the stress response and the expected habituation is an intriguing result. Our results show that R. quelen does not show habituation or accumulation in its stress responses to repeated stressors, as reported for other fish species
Highlights
Fish repeatedly experience stressful situations under experimental and aquaculture conditions, even in its natural habitat
Because the time course of cortisol response, including the exact moment of the peak values, are well determined in R. quelen in these exact experimental conditions (Barcellos et al, 2009; Koakoski et al, 2012), we evaluated only the cortisol concentration at the peak moment and at the time in which these levels are high (5 min. as determined by Koakoski et al, 2012)
Successive acute stressors at a 12h, 48h, and 1-week intervals provoked similar cortisol responses in juvenile R. quelen that were exposed to a different stressor at the third time and those that were exposed to the same stressor 3 times
Summary
Fish repeatedly experience stressful situations under experimental and aquaculture conditions, even in its natural habitat. These stressful stimuli are termed stressors, and the response mounted by the organism to cope with these challenges, the stress response; the latter is a complex response that is coordinated, for the most part, by the hypothalamic-pituitary-interrenal (HPI) axis. Rhamdia quelen (Quoy & Gaimard), the jundiá, a nocturnal catfish species of the family Heptapteridae, known as the silver catfish, is a commercially important fish in southern South. Several stressful managements were imposed to the fish as sampling for biometrical measurements, sampling for disease verification and size selection (due to cannibalism). Most of these managements are performed in weekly periodicity or alternating with another potential stressful management
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