McCallum, Erin and Dey, Cody J. and Cerveny, Daniel and Bose, Aneesh P. H. and Brodin, Tomas
(2021).
Social status modulates the behavioral and physiological consequences of a chemical pollutant in animal groups.
Ecological Applications. 31
, e02454
[Research article]
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Abstract
The social environment (i.e., the suite of social interactions that occur among individuals that can result in variation in social ranks) is a commonly overlooked aspect of biology when scientists evaluate the effects of chemical contaminants. The social environment, however, represents the arena in which individual-level performance shapes group- or population-level outcomes and may therefore mediate many of the ultimate consequences of chemicals for wildlife. Here, we evaluated the role that the social environment plays in determining the consequences of pollutant exposure. We exposed groups of juvenile brown trout (Salmo trutta) to an emerging pharmaceutical pollutant that is commonly detected in freshwaters (the benzodiazepine, oxazepam) and allowed them to form dominance hierarchies. Exposure affected dominant and subordinate fish differently, causing fish to become less aggressive at high doses and subordinate fish to become more competitively successful at low doses. These perturbations had further consequences for growth, fin damage, and survival. Exposure also modulated physiological stress in the hierarchy, and social status itself affected how much oxazepam was absorbed in tissues, potentially creating a dynamic feedback loop that further influences the asymmetric effects of exposure on differing social statuses. Many effects followed a "U-shaped" dose-response curve, highlighting the importance of nonlinear, low-dose effects. Altogether, we show that social structure in animal groups can interact with and modulate the effects of an environmental contaminant. We underscore the need to account for an organism's natural ecological context, including their social environment, in future experiments and environmental risk assessments to predict the effects of chemical contaminants on wildlife.
Authors/Creators: | McCallum, Erin and Dey, Cody J. and Cerveny, Daniel and Bose, Aneesh P. H. and Brodin, Tomas | ||||||
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Title: | Social status modulates the behavioral and physiological consequences of a chemical pollutant in animal groups | ||||||
Series Name/Journal: | Ecological Applications | ||||||
Year of publishing : | 2021 | ||||||
Volume: | 31 | ||||||
Article number: | e02454 | ||||||
Number of Pages: | 11 | ||||||
Publisher: | WILEY | ||||||
ISSN: | 1051-0761 | ||||||
Language: | English | ||||||
Publication Type: | Research article | ||||||
Article category: | Scientific peer reviewed | ||||||
Version: | Published version | ||||||
Copyright: | Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 | ||||||
Full Text Status: | Public | ||||||
Subjects: | (A) Swedish standard research categories 2011 > 1 Natural sciences > 106 Biological Sciences (Medical to be 3 and Agricultural to be 4) > Ecology | ||||||
Keywords: | behavior, cortisol, dominance, ecotoxicology, exposure, fish, oxazepam, pharmaceutical, Salmo trutta, social status, trout | ||||||
URN:NBN: | urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-114287 | ||||||
Permanent URL: | http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-114287 | ||||||
Additional ID: |
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ID Code: | 26341 | ||||||
Faculty: | S - Faculty of Forest Sciences | ||||||
Department: | (S) > Dept. of Wildlife, Fish and Environmental Studies | ||||||
Deposited By: | SLUpub Connector | ||||||
Deposited On: | 20 Dec 2021 05:25 | ||||||
Metadata Last Modified: | 20 Dec 2021 06:01 |
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