Michael Romero, Assistant Professor of Biology Report on Hormonal Responses To Stress In Wild Free-Living Birds

Dear Dr. Berry Chair of FRAC I am writing to provide a report upon the completion of my Mellon Grant Research-Semester Fellowship from the spring of the year 2000. This past Spring was an extraordinarily productive period. The Mellon Fellowship was provided to give me a chance to finish a project on the stress responses of House sparrows. My current research involves studying the hormonal responses to stress in wild free-living birds. In previous research, I'd found that bird species that live in the Arctic change their hormonal responses to stress depending upon the season. In other words, an animal's response to a stressful situation depends upon the time of year (e.g. during breeding or during the winter). The Mellon grant provided me an opportunity to expand these studies to a local species living in a temperate climate that is more benign than the Arctic.  The specific need for a Mellon Fellowship was to allow me the time off from teaching in order to catch the birds. I am using mist nets (a very thin nylon net strung between two poles) to catch the birds. However, adverse weather conditions (e.g. rain and high winds) make it impossible to use mist nets. With my normal teaching load, my success at catching birds was at the mercy of having good weather conditions on the days in which I did not have extensive teaching obligations. The Mellon Fellowship allowed me to use these mist nets on every day of good weather. As a result, I was able to capture over 150 House sparrows during my semester leave. This success has allowed me to nearly complete the project. I have a few more birds to catch this fall (in order to generate sufficient sample sizes), some analyses to do on the data, and then I will be prepared to write several manuscripts on the project and submit them for publication.  The results so far suggest that the project will have some very interesting conclusions. It does appear that House sparrows alter their responses to stress at different times of the year. This is the first indication that temperate species also change their responses to stress in a manner similar to the Arctic species. This will be an important contribution to my field since, once these data are published, it will be clear that a seasonal change in the hormonal responses to stress is a common physiological response in birds.  The Mellon Fellowship has also provided help in my teaching. One of the courses I teach in the fall is a laboratory course on experiments in physiology. I have adapted two of the laboratory exercises to reflect the data that I collected during the past semester leave. In one exercise the students examine some of the hormonal responses to stress in rats and discover how these hormones increase heart rate in response to the minor stress of being picked up and handled. In the other laboratory experiment I adjust the light cycles for the animals in order to mimic different seasons. The students then examine how these changes in light cycles affect the animals’ physiology.  In conclusion, I would like to thank the committee for providing me the funding to take this semester leave. It was a very productive semester that has allowed me to improve both my research productivity and how I transfer my research findings into the classroom.