Biliverdin...oxidative damage...after aggression in veiled chameleons

[kinyonga]

http://www.bioportfolio.com/resourc...gy-after-Simulated-Aggressive-Encounters.html

 

[Lathis]

This is a really interesting interesting paper - looking at physiochemical effects of environmental stressors.

Full article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4569575/

I think it's very interesting here that they are starting with the position that environmental stressors cause known damage to internal organs, particularly the liver, and that they were able to measure a reduction in body mass in the chameleons after exposure to a stress event. Also, the results here were consistent with other animal stress experiments. This supports the belief that gets shared a lot that stress can kill chameleons - it's not "emotional", there are chemical and physical changes/damage that occur as a response to stress events.

I'm curious if the differences observed between WC and CB chameleons can be interpreted to mean that CB chameleons recover from stress more readily than WC? (Also, I wonder how much individual animal "personality" plays into this, but this was outside their experiment scope.) It would support anecdotal evidence, but I am not sure they have enough data to make that correlation...

Thanks for finding this one!

 

[kinyonga]

Thanks for posting the link to the full article Lathis! I thought it was very interesting and would like to know more.