Links between fear of humans, stress and survival support a non-random distribution of birds among urban and rural habitats

Urban endocrine ecology aims to understand how organisms cope with new sources of stress and maintain allostatic load to thrive in an increasingly urbanized world. Recent research efforts have yielded controversial results based on short-term measures of stress, without exploring its fitness effects...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2015-09, Vol.5 (1), p.13723-13723, Article 13723
Main Authors: Rebolo-Ifrán, Natalia, Carrete, Martina, Sanz-Aguilar, Ana, Rodríguez-Martínez, Sol, Cabezas, Sonia, Marchant, Tracy A., Bortolotti, Gary R., Tella, José L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/158/856
631/443
Animals
Birds
Conspecifics
Corticosterone
Ecosystem
Fear
Fitness
Glucocorticoids
Habitats
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Models, Theoretical
multidisciplinary
Population Dynamics
Predation
Rural areas
Science
Secretion
Stress, Physiological
Stress, Psychological
Survival
Urban areas
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Summary:Urban endocrine ecology aims to understand how organisms cope with new sources of stress and maintain allostatic load to thrive in an increasingly urbanized world. Recent research efforts have yielded controversial results based on short-term measures of stress, without exploring its fitness effects. We measured feather corticosterone (CORT f , reflecting the duration and amplitude of glucocorticoid secretion over several weeks) and subsequent annual survival in urban and rural burrowing owls. This species shows high individual consistency in fear of humans (i.e., flight initiation distance, FID), allowing us to hypothesize that individuals distribute among habitats according to their tolerance to human disturbance. FIDs were shorter in urban than in rural birds, but CORT f levels did not differ, nor were correlated to FIDs. Survival was twice as high in urban as in rural birds and links with CORT f varied between habitats: while a quadratic relationship supports stabilizing selection in urban birds, high predation rates may have masked CORT f -survival relationship in rural ones. These results evidence that urban life does not constitute an additional source of stress for urban individuals, as shown by their near identical CORT f values compared with rural conspecifics supporting the non-random distribution of individuals among habitats according to their behavioural phenotypes.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep13723