Stress is contagious, and this also applies to animals
By Sanjana Gajbhiye
Earth.com staff writer
Hanja Brandl, a behavioral biologist from the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, alongside her colleague, Damien Farine (now at Australian National University) decided to shed light on this phenomenon.
In an exceptional study, the team examined the stress responses of individual birds and how it influences others in the group.
Wilderness that was once untouched is rapidly morphing into urban landscapes, evoking changes in animal habitats like never before. Along with climate change, these environmental modifications are ramping up stress factors for animals.
However, a blind spot in research is the exploration of how individual stress levels echo within the group, particularly impacting those untouched by the stressor.
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https://www.earth.com/news/stress-is-contagious-and-this-applies-to-animals-too/
Open Access Research articles
Stress in the social environment: behavioural and social consequences of stress transmission in bird flocks
Hanja B. Brandl and Damien R. Farine
Published: 13 November 2024
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.1961
Abstract
The stress response helps individuals cope with challenges, yet how individual stress levels shape group-level processes and the behaviour of other group members has rarely been explored. In social groups, stress responses can be buffered by others or transmitted to members that have not even experienced the stressor first-hand. Stress transmission, in particular, can have profound consequences for the dynamics of social groups and the fitness of individuals therein. We experimentally induced chronic stress within replicated colonies of zebra finches and used fine-scale tracking to observe the consequences of stress-exposed colony members for the behaviour and reproduction of non-manipulated colony members. Non-manipulated individuals in colonies containing stress-exposed individuals exhibited reduced activity, and fewer—but more differentiated—social bonds. These effects were stronger in colonies with a greater proportion of stress-treated individuals, demonstrating that the impact of stressors can reach beyond directly exposed individuals by also affecting their group mates. We found no evidence that socially transmitted stress affected reproduction or long-term physiological measurement in unmanipulated birds, even though the stress-exposed demonstrators laid slightly fewer eggs and showed stressor-dependent changes in feather corticosterone. Social transmission of these effects, if occurring at all, might be more subtle.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.1961
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