Grundei Lara-Luisa, Wolf Tanja E, Brandes Florian, Schütte Karolin, Freise Fritjof, Siebert Ursula, Touma Chadi, Pees Michael
Department of Small Mammal, Reptile and Avian Medicine and Surgery, University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Foundation, Bünteweg 9, 30559 Hanover, Germany.
Department of Behavioral Biology, School of Biology/Chemistry, Osnabrück University, Barbarastrasse 11, 49076 Osnabrück, Germany.
Animals (Basel). 2024 Apr 19;14(8):1234. doi: 10.3390/ani14081234.
For wild animals, being in captivity in wildlife centers can cause considerable stress. Therefore, it is necessary to establish and validate non-invasive tools to measure chronic stress during rehabilitation. Eight Common Buzzards which lived in permanent husbandry were placed individually into prepared aviaries and their feces were collected before, during and after a stress event for biological validation over a period of seven days. The extracted fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (fGCMs) were analyzed with three different enzyme immune assays (EIA) to find the most suitable one. Additionally, we aimed to investigate the stability of fGCM levels after defecation because further metabolization by bacterial enzymes can lead to changed results. The Cortisone-EIA performed best in males and females and showed that the stress event led to an fGCM increase of 629% (557% in females and 702% in males) in relation to basal values. We found no significant differences between the sexes, but observed significant differences between different times of day. FGCM concentration significantly changed after eight hours at room temperature. Our study successfully validated the non-invasive measurement of fGCM as a stress indicator in Common Buzzards and could therefore lay the foundation for future studies providing new insights for animal welfare research in Buzzards.
对于野生动物而言,被圈养在野生动物中心会造成相当大的压力。因此,有必要建立并验证用于测量康复期间慢性应激的非侵入性工具。将八只长期圈养的普通鵟单独放入准备好的鸟舍中,并在应激事件发生前、期间和之后收集它们的粪便,以便在七天的时间内进行生物学验证。使用三种不同的酶免疫分析(EIA)方法对提取的粪便糖皮质激素代谢物(fGCM)进行分析,以找出最合适的方法。此外,我们旨在研究排便后fGCM水平的稳定性,因为细菌酶的进一步代谢可能导致结果发生变化。可的松 - EIA在雄性和雌性中表现最佳,结果表明,与基础值相比,应激事件导致fGCM增加了629%(雌性为557%,雄性为702%)。我们发现两性之间没有显著差异,但在一天中的不同时间观察到了显著差异。室温下放置八小时后,FGCM浓度发生了显著变化。我们的研究成功验证了将fGCM作为普通鵟应激指标的非侵入性测量方法,因此可为未来的研究奠定基础,为鵟的动物福利研究提供新的见解。