Understanding the onset of health impacts caused by disturbance
Abstract
DAVID LUSSEAU 1, JOHN R. SPEAKMAN 1, ALEX DOUGLAS 1, DORIAN HOUSER 2, CORY CHAMPAGNE 2, MARK STYCZYNSKI 3 AND PATRICIA FAIR 4 1University of Aberdeen, Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Aberdeen, AB24 2TZ, UK; 2National Marine Mammal Foundation, San Diego, California 92106, USA;3School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0100, USA; 4USDOC/NOAA/NOS/NCCOS Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research at Charleston (CCEHBR), Charleston, SC 29412-9110, USA The Population Consequences of Disturbances (PCoD) paradigm provides a mean to link perturbations of individual behavioral dynamics to demography. A crucial process in PCoD is to define a measure of health that can mediate behavioral perturbations to the demographic contributions of individuals. The health indicators we currently used, a measure of body condition such as blubber mass, are coarse and their relationship to individual survival and reproductive success is very noisy. Here we propose to make use of the recent advances in transcriptomics and metabolomics to define adequate ecological health indicators for marine mammals. We distinguish such measures from currently used health indicators as primarily focusing in defining the capacity fo an individual to contribute, through survival and reproduction, to its population. We aim to develop these health ecological indicators that can be related to changes in activity caused by disturbances as well as individual’s demographic contributions. To do so, we will focus on interactions between adipose and hypothalamus biological pathways and relate changes in these tissues to current health indicators – integrating energetic, hormonal, metabolomic and transcriptomic measures to determine the health of individuals. We will make use of a uniquely rich experiment on mice to detect changes in biological pathways in the adipose and hypothalamus when they face foraging disruptions similar to the disruptions observed through acoustic perturbations of cetaceans. This study will identify the biological pathways that are relevant ecological health indicators. We will then use two unique set of bottlenose dolphin longitudinal studies to assess the variability in these biological pathways, using plasma metabolome, among individuals of varying health and condition. This approach will provide a mechanism to develop biomarkers for PCoD that are easier to interpret biologically and also more robust to physiological variability that might exist within- and between- species.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 12, 2016
- Source ID
- N000141512377
Entities
People
- David Lusseau
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Aberdeen