Genetic inheritance and environment determine endocrine plasticity to urban living.

ABSTRACT: As urban areas continue to expand globally, understanding how and why species respond to novel habitats becomes increasingly important. Knowledge of the mechanisms behind observed phenotypic changes in urban animals will enable us to better evaluate the impact of urbanization on current and future generations of wildlife. Physiological changes, such as those involved in the endocrine stress response, may allow individuals to inhabit and thrive in urbanized areas, but it is currently unknown how these changes arise in natural populations. In this study, we performed a four-way cross-foster experiment in free-living house wren chicks, Troglodytes aedon, to disentangle whether differences in baseline corticosterone between urban and rural individuals are a result of genetic and/or plastic mec

SUBMITTER: Ouyang JQ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6710584 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature