Interactions between Biliverdin, Oxidative Damage, and Spleen Morphology after Simulated Aggressive Encounters in Veiled Chameleons…

kinyonga

Chameleon Queen
“First, the time course of our study may have precluded our detection of an effect.”..
“Second, due to the frequency and intensity with which chame-
leons engage in aggressive behaviors [41], it is possible that chameleons have evolved physio-
logical mechanisms to mitigate stress-induced damage initiated by agonistic encounters. If so,
then veiled chameleons would be an appropriate study species for future work investigating
oxidative stress and changes in glucocorticoid concentration in response to both natural and
unnatural stressors“…
“In sum, we found that even in the absence of physical contact, agonistic encounters can
have negative effects (e.g., decreased body mass) in potential combatants. However, these
stressors, which are common in veiled chameleons, failed to induce any other detectable effects
in hematocrit, oxidative damage, relative spleen size, or biliverdin production, suggesting that
these species are generally robust to such ecologically relevant stressors, or that actual fighting
may be necessary to affect these parameters. We also found that relative spleen size is corre-
lated with biliverdin concentration in the bile, but opposite to the direction that we predicted.
This suggests that either veiled chameleons have a particularly unique plasticity in spleen size,
or that natural variation in spleen size represents an opposite pattern to plasticity in spleen
size. Lastly, we found that relative spleen size is negatively correlated with oxidative damage in
both the spleen and liver, highlighting the potentially important role the spleen has in manag-
ing systemic levels of oxidative damage”…
https://www.researchgate.net/public...ed_Aggressive_Encounters_in_Veiled_Chameleons
 
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