I had initially planned on measuring chronic stress using secreted free cortisol (via ELISA), but preliminary testing shows that this method is too sensitive to handling stress and similar variability/perturbations. In spitballing solutions to this with a colleague, she suggested looking at measuring fecal hormone levels.
I am working with the females of the east African cichlid species Astatotilapia burtoni, and my experimental subjects are, on average, 3.6±0.35cm long and weigh 1.44±0.42g.
The biggest problem I have run into is finding a method that will work with fish of the size I am working with. All the literature I have found so far is in either mammals, birds, or other similar taxa, the only paper in the fish literature was working with parrotfish, which are, as juveniles, 9-10 times larger than the adult females I am working with. This, naturally, raises concerns in my mind with regard to my ability to collect a sufficient fecal volume from a given individual on a given week to have any meaningful detection power.
Hi Denis,
of course that's not an easy task - some time ago I organized a conference here in Vienna about non-invasive methods for measuring steroids - and we had an excellent talk about fish - enclosed please find the respective reviews the authors wrote in a special issue related to the conference.
Hope you find it useful
Kind regards
Rupert
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