I'm interested to measure cumulative stress effects of fish life-history strategies. Thereby I'd like to observe stress levels during the development as an individualistic time series. Main problem is that catching, anaesthesia and blood sampling may cause extra stress to fish and bias to data. Does anyone have any experience if the stress could be measured any other way more reliable? Or is there any reliable indicator for stress than stress hormones that could be measured?
Maybe you could measure free cortisol in the water? However, you may only be able to get relative measures among individuals for each time-point. I'm not entierly sure about how it works, I've only read papers where the method is used... Hard to get individual measurements though, unless you somehow keep the individuals separate (maybe you have to do this anyway, otherwise dominance hierarchies may influence both stress-levels, growth and behaviour as a confounding factor...). Here is a paper, and I guess all the other papers citing it are good sources as well: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-1112.2004.00499.x/full
Thanks for the tip Joacim, I've to get familiar with this method and check if it's suitable for my purposes.
My idea is to somehow observe sensitivity to stress of different outbred hybrid (wild and domesticated hatchery lines) of Brown trout in semi-natural ponds. I'm trying to study could stress be a factor behind different life-history decision like smoltification. As I have understood, early-life stress is correlated with natal dispersal distance in Passerines and my idea is to test could stress have a similar function behind fish behaviour. So the main point is to observe the real stress level caused by environment where they're growing and possible genetic variation of stress tolerance. That's why is crucial to avoid causing any extra stress by sampling.
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