Interactions between corticosterone phenotype, environmental stressor pervasiveness and irruptive movement-related survival

Abstract

Animals use irruptive movement to avoid exposure to stochastic and pervasive environmental stressors that impact fitness. Beneficial irruptive movements transfer individuals from high-stress areas (conferring low fitness) to alternate localities that may improve survival or reproduction. However, being stochastic, environmental stressors can limit an animal's preparatory capacity to enhance irruptive movement performance. Thus individuals must rely on standing, or rapidly induced, physiological and behavioural responses. Rapid elevation of glucocorticoid hormones in response to environmental stressors are widely implicated in adjusting physiological and behaviour processes that could influence irruptive movement capacity. However, there remains little direct evidence to demonstrate that corticosterone regulated movement performance, nor the interaction with the pervasiveness of environmental stress, confers adaptive movement outcomes. Here we compared how movement-related survival of cane toads (Rhinella marina) varied with three different experimental corticosterone phenotypes across four increments of increasing environmental stressor pervasiveness (i.e. distance from water in a semi-arid landscape). Our results indicated that toads with phenotypically increased corticosterone levels attained higher movement-related survival compared to individuals with control or lowered corticosterone phenotypes. However, the effects of corticosterone phenotypes on movement-related survival to some extent co-varied with stressor pervasiveness. Thus our study demonstrates how the interplay among an individual's corticosterone phenotype and movement capacity alongside the arising costs of movement and the pervasiveness of the environmental stressor can affect survival outcomes.