Blubber cortisol: a potential tool for assessing stress response in free-ranging dolphins without effects due to sampling.

ABSTRACT: When paired with dart biopsying, quantifying cortisol in blubber tissue may provide an index of relative stress levels (i.e., activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis) in free-ranging cetacean populations while minimizing the effects of the act of sampling. To validate this approach, cortisol was extracted from blubber samples collected from beach-stranded and bycaught short-beaked common dolphins using a modified blubber steroid isolation technique and measured via commercially available enzyme immunoassays. The measurements exhibited appropriate quality characteristics when analyzed via a bootstraped stepwise parallelism analysis (observed/expected = 1.03, 95%CI: 99.6 - 1.08) and showed no evidence of matrix interference with increasing sample size across typical biopsy tiss

SUBMITTER: Kellar NM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4314064 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature