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| A Siren call: Integrating individual wild animal welfare across time and ecological contexts. |
| Thomas Luhring1, Meg Flanagan2, Sydney Falcon1, Jacob Kearns1, Caitlin Gabor2, Christopher Schalk3, Carmen Montana4. 1Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, United States; 2Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, United States; 3US Forest Service Southern Research Station, Nacogdoches, TX, United States; 4Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, TX, United States |
A key impediment to assessing or implementing interventions in wild animal welfare is the lack of species-specific and individual-level data across time. In an ongoing study, we track water-borne stress hormones (corticosterone for assessing coping capacity), body condition, and other welfare-related measures across time for individual free-ranging lesser sirens (Siren intermedia) across four populations in Eastern Texas. These age/stage-structured data will allow us to create time-integrating measures of individual welfare that incorporate changing ecological contexts across ontogeny. Concurrent with our need to identify individuals, we also assess the relative utility and stress impacts (immediate and accumulated) of an established marking technique (implanted microchips) and a potentially useful non-invasive approach (image pattern recognition). ����� |