Noise and light pollution elicit endocrine responses in urban but not forest frogs

DOI

Urban areas are characterised by the presence of sensory pollutants, such as anthropogenic noise and artificial light at night (ALAN). Animals can quickly adapt to novel environmental conditions by adjusting their behaviour, which is proximately regulated by endocrine systems. While endocrine responses to sensory pollution have been widely reported, this has not often been linked to changes in behaviour, hampering the understanding of adaptiveness of endocrine responses. Our aim was, therefore, to investigate the effects of urbanisation, specifically urban noise and light pollution, on hormone levels in urban and forest male túngara frogs (Engystomops pustulosus), a species with reported population divergence in behaviour in response to urbanisation. We quantified testosterone and corticosterone concentrations in the field and in the lab before and after exposure to urban noise and/or light. We show that urban and forest frogs differ in their endocrine phenotypes in the field and under common garden conditions. Moreover, in urban frogs exposure to urban noise and light led, respectively, to an increase in testosterone and decrease in corticosterone, whereas in forest frogs sensory pollutants did not elicit any endocrine response. Our results show that urbanisation, specifically noise and light pollution, can modulate hormone levels in urban and forest populations differentially. This endocrine plasticity is consistent with the observed behavioural changes in urban frogs, providing a proximate explanation for the presumably adaptive behavioural changes in response to urbanisation.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/TA0XUT
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/TA0XUT
Provenance
Creator Smit, Judith ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Smit, Judith
Publication Year 2023
Rights CC0 1.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Smit, Judith (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Representation
Resource Type Observational and experimental data; Dataset
Format text/csv; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; type/x-r-syntax
Size 1196; 1757; 3392; 429; 13776; 16499; 3244; 1076; 33650
Version 2.0
Discipline Earth and Environmental Science; Environmental Research; Geosciences; Life Sciences; Medicine; Medicine and Health; Natural Sciences; Physiology