Grantee: Dave Daversa

Institutions: University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Grant amount: $253,956

Grant type: Fellowship

Focal species: Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis)

Conservation status: Least concern

Research location: United States

Project summary

This project will study a recognized but neglected area of animal welfare research, especially important for wild animals. Specifically, the project will investigate different landscapes of fear that wild animals are exposed to and their relative welfare impacts. In addition to elucidating the direct effects of fear on stress and welfare, the project aims to improve scientific understanding of potential indirect knock-on effects that fear can cause by assessing how the lifetime welfare effects of fear vary with respect to the animal’s life history strategy, as well as provide insights into some of the system-level effects.

Further, the project seeks to apply a cutting-edge approach to the study of welfare: cumulative stress across lifespans. This study’s approach (cumulative) and timespan (lifespan) are relatively novel elements for which much greater understanding is needed. The study proposes using DNA methylation to understand the aging and health of individual animals. Additional welfare indicators are always valuable to improve our ability to assess wild animals’ welfare. However, DNA methylation, if its link to welfare can be validated, holds special potential because, like telomeres and a small group of other biomarkers of biological age, it may record cumulative stress over an animal’s lifetime. Because it is DNA-based, it could be built in as a secondary objective to mainstream conservation genetics projects.

The study will combine multiple lines of evidence of welfare (behavioral, hormonal, and epigenetic) to investigate stress and welfare, and in so doing, would address important gaps in the knowledge of welfare in the wild: understanding the impact of fear on physiological stress and its impact on long-term welfare, assessing the components of the landscape leading to a fear response and resultant difference in welfare, and understanding how variation in life history strategies differentially interact with long-term welfare. The potential for indirect, interactive system-level effects is currently one of the most important unknowns impeding wild animal welfare-focused interventions. The project is ambitious but well-considered, and it is clear that Dave and his mentors have carefully designed the methods to achieve the stated objectives.

Find Dave’s other project, studying western toads, here.

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