> Bird study finds maternal stress ‘positive’
Bird study finds maternal stress ‘positive’
October 10, 2008
Maternal stress can be a good thing – if you’re a mother starling.
SFU researchers Oliver Love and Tony Williams and a team from Trent University discovered that hormones released by stressed mother starlings can actually improve the physical development of their offspring.
The researchers’ findings are published in the current edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
European starling eggs from nests located on a Langley dairy farm were given experimental increases of the stress hormone corticosterone. The increase mimicked the signal given to offspring that they are being raised in a low quality environment.
Surprisingly, the birds left the nest with increased flight performance and had larger, more mature flight muscles.
Researchers say it’s difficult to gauge whether an increase in performance equates to increasing chances of survival, but suggest the hormone is part of a “package strategy” allowing the offspring to cope under poor circumstances.
“We believe that the chicks are using a maternal hormonal cue as an honest indicator of the quality of the environment they will be fledging into,” says Love. “As such, they may use this cue to prepare for a more stressful world by speeding up the development of traits that increase survival prospects.”
There are approximately six to eight million European starlings in North America.
Love, a post-doctoral researcher in biology at SFU, collected data for the study as part of his PhD examining effects of maternal stress on offspring quality and maternal fitness.
He recently returned from the Arctic, where he is studying the impact of climate change induced warming on the reproduction and decline of two other bird species - common eiders and snow buntings.
SFU researchers Oliver Love and Tony Williams and a team from Trent University discovered that hormones released by stressed mother starlings can actually improve the physical development of their offspring.
The researchers’ findings are published in the current edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
European starling eggs from nests located on a Langley dairy farm were given experimental increases of the stress hormone corticosterone. The increase mimicked the signal given to offspring that they are being raised in a low quality environment.
Surprisingly, the birds left the nest with increased flight performance and had larger, more mature flight muscles.
Researchers say it’s difficult to gauge whether an increase in performance equates to increasing chances of survival, but suggest the hormone is part of a “package strategy” allowing the offspring to cope under poor circumstances.
“We believe that the chicks are using a maternal hormonal cue as an honest indicator of the quality of the environment they will be fledging into,” says Love. “As such, they may use this cue to prepare for a more stressful world by speeding up the development of traits that increase survival prospects.”
There are approximately six to eight million European starlings in North America.
Love, a post-doctoral researcher in biology at SFU, collected data for the study as part of his PhD examining effects of maternal stress on offspring quality and maternal fitness.
He recently returned from the Arctic, where he is studying the impact of climate change induced warming on the reproduction and decline of two other bird species - common eiders and snow buntings.