Dr Edward Narayan (AgFS): “Applications of non-invasive stress monitoring tools for the conservation and management of wildlife species”, a CBCS Tuesday seminar
all right thank you all for coming um it is my pleasure to introduce Edward Narayan um he is a self-described champion of animal welfare and conservation physiology uh he did his PhD at the University of South Pacific which I have visited subba yeah Y which is a very beautiful place in Fiji with great access to Outdoors um frogs Yeah you’re going to tell us about it yep frob he did post off phobia I have to say frog phobia please there’ll be pictures of frogs and videos okay cool uh he did post dos in New Zealand Australia India and Canada sisu cool and then uh he returned to Australia 2010 with Griffith before eventually moving here now he is based at ukq at Gatten in safs not the BET school right not why moving around you were in the vet school no okay I am Affiliated okay cool with coffee and uh SVS as well teaching to the VCH program okay yeah what is that vachel of veternary Technology oh yeah vetch got it all the wetness is s other the skin and yeah cool um so he has a wide variety of interests around animal welfare and he’s going to be telling that um his story I think a few different case studies today thank you from his different research so thank you for coming thank you everyone um and really great to see all of the colleagues joining us in person and also online so thank you very much I’m also here with a few of my students from uh gon who are coming to join us so please uh uh feel them uh feel feel hely um I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners and their custodians ships on the land we beat uh pay my respect with the ancestors descendants and with the continuous cultural and spiritual connections of the country I recognize the available contributions to Australia in the global Society so uh as we’ve just heard about my career trajectory we’ve got a few students I Believe In The Crowd so this is where I was and then moved around and have been at UK for a bit over 5 years now um there has been a lot of footsteps and Footprints uh for the work that I have gaed um in the space of conservation physiology and Animal Welfare science uh and so there is a lot of people whom I have been lucky enough to uh get to know and learn from uh my professor mariro and and Frank molana I’m sorry this one is a bit weak but um they have all you know helped me out you might uh um see that the students as well who have been the Champions it’s not just me I’m not the champion they are the ones who make uh so it’s the stress L and so what the stress L is basically is that they uh we are trying in our gr to understand about animals so we um I uh have a lab where we can actually sucest reproductive and stress profiles of vs we’ve just had Yi submitting a PhD thises looking at the large mouth vest so she went to China and studied so all the way from Wildlife agricultural animals pets we’ve had some students at the emotions of U of horses that are used for Equine Therapy as well as dogs that are actually used for walk uh and to reduce uh stress in humans so we are doing all sorts of research um there’s a lot of animals that uh we haven’t been able to tap into but this is the beauty of for me as a as a researcher starting off frog from frogs we are are now actually able to learn and I think the learnings that I uh uh am am picking up every day it’s it’s it’s giving me a lot of uh you know things um to work on and and the latest one I think from here is that I’ve just been um offered a well um sort of um got accepted for a book deal with LCA to write on stressing animals so that’s that’s a huge commitment for me for the next two years um so conservation physiology is actually understanding the physiological response of U animals to human alterations of the environment we know Professor Craig Frankl and he he was my mentor he was my referee for my job here so I always am highly indebted to pray um you know the conservation physiology theme how many of you have heard of this please raise your hands brilliant so we’ve got a few of us over here so we try to look at the positive mechanisms of uh the underlying Under the Skin how we can actually assess animal uh and their response to environmental change and then make some contributions to the discussions and and and and uh uh all the way from the ground level to policy uh actions and policy making and and you’ll see some of the ways that we’ve been trying to do that as well I will briefly mention about climate change we all know what it is uh it’s basically the you know the the effect of humans contributing to the aggressive nature of how you know the atmospheric uh uh temperature has become ever more agravated and it’s actually leading to uh you know micro and scale changes to our environment and especially coming from Fiji and Pacific Islands I’m feeling very vulnerable uh with what will happen to our communities and and I’m going back to Fiji in three weeks and I’m trying to engage with the nature Fiji to see if we can actually reignite some of the conservation discussions around how we can save some of these endemic species on Islands because uh time is against you know we um so been uh lucky some of the hard heers in this game so you can see that you know we’ve been trying to see how we can use physiology um to be part of the conversation around predicting the global warming and also then mitigating um you know and and so physiology is an important part of this um so this is where I was for almost four years doing my PhD I took this picture on a flight uh to Bal you meet my brother who’s a dentist on this big island and he’s been like removing teeth from all fijians out there and I said I’ve seen this island before and I said no Edward that’s where I was and so I quickly took the snapshot uh you can see there’s two halves um this is not working I should just use my and um there’s two halves to the island where if it’s uh yeah it’s it’s really emotional for me because there’s a lot of you know stuff going on over here so you can see if it’s high TI you can go straight to the Village there’s around 50 uh people on the island so it’s 60 hectares and um that small island over there the little to that’s a traditional spot for for funerals and things it’s very very um sacred um so uh this island is actually uh encompassing ground frogs so for me as a 20year old my supervisor Craig moly who was a wellknown ecologist from New Zealand he said Edward you will I will throw you to this island you’re going to go and catch frogs I was into textbooks and getting A+ and whatever you know like I didn’t know what I’m signing up for but that’s what my life was to go and collect frog pee and you’ll know why I was doing that but um the frog is actually all over the island and so when I landed the island I discovered that it’s a meca of ground frogs it’s just unbelievable and it’s it’s we’ll have a chat about that hopefully you’ll have lots of question to ask me so this is where we are this is Fiji ban labu v labu u this is where I was born uh that little circle over there um um had my whole life on this little village with my parents and then uh you know studied on VI Island it’s it’s very uh emotional for me to you know then uh come from Fiji to Australia and be here for the last 15 years so so you know um how like we can actually understand the Ecology of some of the species of which virtually nothing is known um we are running against time so um I had two supervisors one was a hardcore physiologist from India Professor Christie and then I had a frog uh ecologist or a biodiversity conservationist Craig moly I was sanded in the middle as a PhD student um to go go and discover the biology of this unknown species there was some records about the natural history of the ground frogs but virally not much was known so keton said Edward go and cut up some frogs we submitted the ethics application got knocked back you can’t cut ground frogs right because it’s I and and dangered species um so then turn the tide and luckily at that time in New Zealand they were trying to develop conservation physiology tools for the Arches for so the Arches frog is a highly um uh you know threatened species in in in New Zealand and so they were trying to develop conservation physi physiology tool with Jen germano who’s uh doing the PHD the same time as me in New Zealand and I Fiji and so we went into this expedition to collect frog uran so it was very funny um a bit of a race as well um but the important thing here was that try actually sequester the the the hormones and understand the Ecology of these animals why we are trying to do that um what does it tell us so basically you can see uh the connection between the brain and the behavior of the animals I would say the behavior is secondary there is already some sort of a physiological change that is happening inside the animal’s body which would then tune the animals behavioral response it may not always be the case sometimes you will have behavioral response in the absence of physiological change because this is energetically demanding you have to use ATP to be able to have that burst of energetic response for the muscles to perform its activity because this would be like if the snake is about to catch the Frog he can jump away from that fair so it’s not a bad thing if you are secreting cortisol but you will notice that through long time period it’s this scale of turning on and tning off of the stress response which works around this concept of negative feedback which is basically to maintain homeostasis but as you will see my research started off into studying frogs and also other animals in zoo settings and in very mild environments where you can see that the turn on and the turn off of the response is very much clear you can notice you know you’re moving quas from one place to another or in the zoo you handling them they would show our response in the Teno but then I can see now with some of the work of my other you know team members we are seeing that the turning off is not happening anymore and so that’s where we are now zoning into as well some of the work that har is doing as well for his PhD this is the fun of being on the AR these are not my kids my 9-year-old saw this picture and was like Dad what’s all that why are you hiding this photos no this is the fun of you know being on the island highly I would say I’m in the right place I feel like I’m at home here and it’s really amazing that you know that’s b island uh you know where the um first military sort of like the the chiefly War happened between Tongans and fijians uh for the rights of their their land and uh via island is very much uh uh important because Bible was translated to the Fijian language on this island so it’s a very complex environment because one of the Landscapes is where there’s a pond and and Craig and I wanted to shut up that P but the uh priest used to Bath on that in that P so it’s actually a very complex uh place to walk in if you were to do some uh you know conservation work because we wanted to remove the ks on the island as well so I took all the Frog P to New Zealand to Frank molana who was at the echoen lab so this is the New Zealand where I took all the Frog PE and you know uh but stopped at the airport and the humor of that but then um this is where we actually managed to um discover for the first time as you would do in your PhD that you can uh measure stress responses or reproductive and stress hormones from the same cocktail of urine sample of the frogs so the beauty of this is that you you would just go in I remember collecting the samples I didn’t know if I’ll measure anything in that and I I was like you know 2 a.m. 3 a.m. in the morning with my head coach catching frogs you know collecting this sample that looks like just water like what the heck would there be anything in this uh but I had to believe in my professors uh because back in USP there wasn’t much resources available at that time to actually do any validation work so I basically took a huge risk taking all the raw samples with me to New Zealand but it actually worked there’s another story around that but you know things did not work like they had to change the Milik water and all other things you know lots of fun of PhD the failures of PhD but eventually it did work and then that opened up a beauty of looking at the Ecology of the animal uh and understanding what the physiology is doing so some really basic this is basic biology it’s not rocket science looking at how the testosterone profiles vary in the ground frogs with the Fijian wet season if you go to Fiji during Christmas it’ll be really really wet you must have caught in some of the Cyclones in Fiji at that time I remember my uh uncle and aunts used to come from Canada and they caught up in the uh in in the Cyclones and you know we were little kids and you can see the progesterone profile the estrogen so this is all animal welfare friendly we are actually opening up the whole world of the biology of this of this animal non invasively which is really really uh cool I think but the other thing was that what about the developmental biology so this is a process known as candling where you can actually put the Frog 10 off your head torch look at the eggs so my job was to measure the eggs every month and then come up with a a chart that would tell me that the female is actually gravid she is at this stage of vogenesis and you know this stage not this is the first time that I discovered the eggs of ground frogs it was um amazing Fiji One News like ABC came on my on our doorsteps crank said Edward go and save these frogs and release them on another Island I said okay Kon said no Edward you look at the development biology and then do some other physiological look at how it’s affected by temperature we can do a uh you know a altitudinal gradient kind of a uh you know study looking at how temperature FS this froes what would happen I said no M I have to finish my PhD I didn’t like know what to do then and but basically what the end point was that these guys um that’s what it looks like just take a little sip of water while you immerse in the picture I took the good thing about these guys is that they actually have direct development so they don’t uh give birth to a tple a baby frog comes out in 29 days they have some really interesting synergies with crabs uh with ends the frogs jelly is actually covered with antimicrobial properties there could be 10d projects I was talking to Sebastian before um you know and it’s amazing how much more work can be done on this island and that’s I think where we need to look at as well it’s a really cool field site for students so in Mark hero Jean Mark hero he’s at Griffith University um and Craig moly and C the two you know m is over here and Mark was at Griffith University so he was my PhD examiner then I did my POS look at Griffith he was fascinated by this stuff he said Ed come and join me he helped me to publish this paper not amazing macroscopy but we can actually see the whole development biology with some basic life microscopy in Fiji at that time uh to see the actual development of the you the blood vessels the vertebral column they have a little bit of a egg for 5 days egg YK on which they feed and then it covers off afterwards so they’re really cool animals um then basically what happens is that you have chronic stress right so this is all operating over here in the in the basic eological scale where you have this standing on and standing off resting homeostasis you have the predictive and responsive state but then overall if you remove the environment in some way like pollutants or Forest destruction you end up actually affecting the negative feedback loop and it leads to chronic stress it’s a very basic diagram over here bit sad so I collaborated with Team job at Melbourne University and we did a bit of a research on controlling the K Toads by setting up macro uh exclusion Chambers and uh that was my first ever big Piper in functional ecology so I was very proud of that uh but basically what it demonstrated was that the reproductive output of the ground frogs would be affected by the fear inflicted by the K TOS on them it’s amazing I’m seeing this research being cited similar to my other research from other Landscapes like with fire ends or with invasive liards between native uh uh reptiles or native snakes all over the board there are some really interesting synergies with how a invasive species can really uh double down on the ecological Fitness of a endemic species so we still have an TOS on this island and my dream is to to actually come up with some strategies where we can remove in toads people on the island are doing agriculture they are having slush burning of the landscape um and I think there needs to be more that scientist and the government can do together to actually help uh the villages to be better equipped with looking after the ground frogs they have high respect for the ground frogs this is their totem this is their um this is like similar to you know you know like um The W stale eagle or something like or the Tigers in India or the elephants like this is a huge thing for them and so um you know it’s it’s it’s going through a lot of problems so then when I came to uh Griffith there was an opportunity to to go to India and uh with the help of the Australia India ear Korea Fellowship through the Australian Academy of Science I met Professor grma who was based at the University of Pune that’s where harsh is from so I met har through there and this is their laboratory Beautiful People beautiful students you know their laboratory they are studying the Ecology of some of the really rare and dangered frogs in India at that time and so I took my leg with me with the kids on a plane to India help uh set up the project for them and am josi actually this was our field site in Matan which is actually uh in in in uh Pune and so you can see that the male frog is guarding his the eggs uh the NIT pads and The beautiful landscape so uh we studied the frogs and we then discovered am josi she finished her PhD few years ago and we were able to actually correlate the breeding ecology calling Behavior to testosterone profiles in the urine sample how you collect frog from a tiny frog like this sorry how you collect urine fromat frog like this there’s a lot of technique involved and so yes it is it wasn’t it was rudimentary when I was a PhD student throw a cup ground frog would just PE on everywhere you know but these guys actually are very fast so you have to minimize their stress and there was some optimization of the techniques with the work done by fil bar at the wulong captive breeding facility for cor frogs and so we with amila Phil and the team we actually have got some papers out there which actually talks about how you have you know microt tubes that can actually help in sequestering enough urine uh that would be able to uh you know uh detect the uh hormones so Mark hero he is a hero Mar hero and so he was fascinated by frog biology and so he discovered that the Loria wixy would change color he used to go hiking or cycling or whatever on the Spring Brook you know up up the mountain and uh that’s V VTO and that’s John Shuka that’s Mark sitting over there I think I’m taking the picture VTO arrived from Brazil that night dragged him with his suitcase from the airport to the field side and we actually looked at the color change behavior in the Loria we could see Christina did a PhD and we could actually see the relationship between corticosterone and testosterone with the color change behavior of the Frog so I don’t have a video in here but it was really cool because the Frog would be brown and then in one minute it would become bright yellow so what’s the reason of becoming detectable to my Predators is breeding so important or is it a tradeoff of some other so you can look up uh Christin PhD work this is something that’s existing in reptiles and snakes as well and it could also be a indicator of stress in animals so then I teamed up with colleagues um in the US uh Caitlyn goo I have been I have high respect for Caitlyn she’s been doing a lot of work in salamanders waterbone hormones um and so we can now and with Drew Davies and Zachary Force back Zachary finished his PhD on Ellen artificial light at at night and how that effect affects frogs we wrote this paper the aim was to actually like somebody connected to me uh oneing to study the late TI frog you know like and so I just want to pick up my bag stop the teaching go and study all these frogs in different parts that’s my dream I don’t think I’ll be able to achieve it uh I need the students to do that for me you um the connection is there right and so um I think for 5 minutes I’ll talk a little bit about your kitchen yeah so a little bit of a brether immersing that picture I take a bit of water so you know um this will be a short story right so basically with kalas Mark said Edward you can actually measure the same stress markers in koalas and Bill be so put papers on BB SAS WS daggers and all you know he had a big connection with col the dream world but then I when I when I went to New South Wales I actually started connecting with the koala rescue groups because when you look at that uh you know negative feedback look these guys are at the war zone of what’s happening to them in terms of you know Hab change and all that so I’ll cut the story short netive feedback loop is bugged up you can see over here U cortisol then becomes a threat to the animals longivity and in survival um and this is basically some of the landscape this is from South Australia one of our field sites well it is a field site it’s just a you know study site where quas are found and so these are some of the quas that would be occurring in this landscape so they are really much dispersed all over the board you know what we have here in Brisbane with our colleagues uh doing amazing research on callers here as well um so I basically asked the question uh what is that the International fund for Animal Welfare said Edward why don’t you look at this uh area well before that what we discovered was that koalas are actually coming up in um in cities so new research suggests koalas rescued from rural areas more stressed than those from Urban centers it’s m because animals from more populated areas orust to people around this KOA Jo is having a final check up got it bling on it will soon be released back into the wild it’s one ofs treated at the MCA hospital every year from disease which is the Mion we see Kal by dogs when it comes to saving injured koalas the animal stress level can be a so can a major impact on their treatment a new study from West Sydney university has measured and compared stress levels in rescued from urban areas with those found in rural settings trying to understand how they respond to environmental change Ed his team used stat sample set in Wildlife groups to detect stress hormones found in in rural areas in rural urban bridge where the most stressed what was really interesting to us was that in other areas we actually showing lot of signs of stress the rearch say that finding don’t make Koalas in Ur environments aren’t stressed it simply means they’re less stressed and appear to have become better coming into contact with humans they believe it’s evidence the animals can adapt to having us around that they need to have protected habitats if we don’t deal with stress with regards to our native wildli we will see more and more beautiful animals will end up becoming extinct something no one wants to say Jonathan ha AB news yep so what I did was I had a lot of data on that acute state of stress response from the work I did in healthy animals in green wall gr Bean um along the Gold Coast looking at uh you know Southport area there was some healthy animals right and um in balina this is balina so this is uh the northern Rivers really interesting landscape where we’ve got koalas actually now are cross cutting so I took my bag and went into this landscape it’s horrific the people was looking trickly stressed out like you could hear the the the the thing that goes inside the water to build Bridges would shake your house basically you can’t have a cup of tea and so what what they did was they created a a connection I think from um from balina to towards bar area or something like that I’m about to go there to have a look at what this actually is and that was our field side so basically what I did was run a marathon of all the stress data that I had on quas and this went through scientific um you know um um uh review and I had some really good people who know uh the field really well who read my manuscript and they actually rather than just dumping it because it’s not an ecologist you know fun thing where you have lots of data or you could do fun things I’d love to do fun things with you know eological modeling and I’m not I’m not eological model you know but I think I was able to demonstrate how the stress levels are different in in in regards to different stresses so like you know acute stress goack like that would not kick in your stress response you know um like you would not measure that immediately but the state of the environment Lance was significant so that was a big one and I’m I’m really interested in doing more work in that space as well how we can minimize stressing burn victims by working with the uh you know the uh Rescuers and the carers to uh minimize stress in these animals and you’d see qulet on the ground they do drink water um and CIA is a big one as well so you know we know media is a massive stresser ofus um so you know that was something that uh attracted a lot of attention and then I discovered that I didn’t know about this but my work was presented at the Parliamentary inquiry um so that was really important for us to then uh see that in some way our work was actually being presented as part of the uh the community of practice that we have got to then advocate for this our animal animals and so that was just a 3 in this one last night just to I know we are walking around that policy and all these things in here the center of bation so I think you guys would be happy with me I don’t know maybe not um so yeah that’s the story with with the callers guys we got together there were 13 authors on this paper Joe is actually second year student R the stress left team and we actually wrote a review on how stress is affecting animals around the world and um I’d say that’s where you know I’m I’m wrapping it up um you most welcome to you know if you on X or not but yeah really keen on doing two new projects um looking for students ground frog work that’s a mecha of ecology like if you are Keen to go in a rug landscape lovely beautiful and and study biology of animals it’s not just ground frogs there SNES liards I’m keen and I need support and so I think support in terms of more team members to who who are believing in in doing a personal change in the Pacific T and then the follow of course is part of the discussion so uh with that um thanking everyone thank you again uh to all the colleagues over here and online I’ll leave you with a little video show your magnetic Al munching on so she was rescued um her mom died and was rescued so thank you very much all right are there some questions do you find with your research because you have to your s from extion it kind of affects so I know it would be pretty difficult to yeah so that’s a really good question for every species that you are trying to develop the assays you need to understand the excretory La ter right and so we do some basic uh laboratory and physiological validations to then understand what’s the window between the actual absolute Baseline to when yeah oh okay um you did you find out how long it actually takes to um ESR the um the stress for FRS yes yeah thanks for asking a question about frogs Yeah bless you the grounds yeah I love it yeah that was my life to actually with K he’s a digestive physiologist so my supervisor PhD advisor and so we actually did HCG and IC Challenge and discovered that the stress response was around two to three days was very short admired and so that was really good because I had to run and catch the Frog and then get the cup ready B you know he’s done his job backing in the ziplo give it to my You Know Field assistant and so that stress we then had some buckets out because John cochr who was my adviser from Messi he’s a stress a penguin stress physiologist he studied Penguins so we did the acute stress response so we kept frogs in a bucket uh overnight and then saw the actual uh uh secretion of the hormones throughout the night as well so does that answer your question yes yes so then you can type that into account you doing yeah sorry yeah you can sorry yeah so for any new animal that you’re trying to work on you need to do but it’s very hard to um do a biological validation on some carematic animals or really rare animals like tigers so we relied on the veterinary health checks and mind you the Tigers still didn’t like the needle why they showed a response which was good for for us because we’ve Ted that box because that’s important so I think the next talk would be harsh when he’s talking about the different ass techniques because he’s going really in my my PhD student who’s not here today he’s he’s going right deep into the technicalities of of measuring coms but there’s thousands of papers and hormonal measurements in all sorts of animals right and so I’d say yeah yeah and so there is absolute uh numbers around what the baseland levels are and then you can actually measure not just in saliva or pces but here and look at longterm responses as well yes different question the I think there’s been a bit of a conversation of the social side ofation of bringing Wild Life sh table when we are making decisions and when you start talking about the physiological responses that and something that came out in my mind maybe that’s a way of giving Wild Life rep beautiful question thank you for asking yeah beautiful question and I think that’s why we are doing all this because we are all part of a family and we have got techniques that actually you know has something to talk about about what the animals are trying to tell us because they have been here far long than we have been here and so our kalas our frogs our butterflies our bees and all these animals and so stress seems just by chance is one part of the story and so uh if you see animals are really sick and injured or are really showing signs of stress that’s actually a sign that there could be some problems in the in for humans as well so it’s always easier to sell the human stress story because if it stresses me then I’m really you know agitated uh but I think there community members like we had you know the foxes that that were in the you know Brisbane area there were some new people who who didn’t know much about the flying foxes and and they were trying to you know just remove all of these guys you know but then they were we try to understand how to live with animals it’s not easy but I think uh more education more Community understanding and scientist actually uh condensing their research in a way that is communicable like you can communicate in in in the pub or you know in everyday language I that’s where we need to be able to then um reach out and reach in as well so that’s a biod directional um you know so that we can make positive change it’s not easy you guys know more than me for Animals displaying chronic stress levels and like obviously hormonal stress what kind of techniques can you implement to reverse that or lower the hormonal stress signals I’m looking at Jen because she’s studying the the black bears in Vietnam ji do you want to answer this question or say a few words while I don’t talk much sorry you I know you can answer like we’re stilling on the like theevs of like then show after the like theic stress and the P stress and I think level physiology like the the HP access like the negative effect the will eventually show up in the result of consol level so we’re still trying to understand especially for my project we are working with vs and those levels of control still need a um more an analyzes and um we should combine the behavior and and other factors into account and we combine this data like those Behavior reportings with the the measurement result of the to fin out this beautifully said and I think what J also so we can see that there’s plasticity there’s flexibility and this is actually walk streaming from the biomedical literature the work of like Professor Bruce mchan who lucky enough I don’t know how he followed me like became my friend with lindin he’s the father of stress biology right and so and sapolsky the you know why giraffes don’t get gastric ala his book that’s all actually telling us that animals actually have a bit of a flexibility to be able to cope with the stress but we humans always get agitated by every single thing that is not in our comfort zone so there is plasticity and we’ve seen then we we we’ve had love to we talking to animal Asia and maybe with the vet school how we can look at dendrites and they actually re Branch it’s like what are the plants which are dying and they re brch and so animals behave in the same way thank you I’ve got to run so thank you but let’s chat about Community Education engagement cheers thank yeah it might come in your dream I have dreams about frogs actually I’m talking about frogs catching frogs in your dream like the heck we can do a study on that as well everyone’s welcome it’s it’s not yeah it’s a real real thing that happened to anyone else has any questions or thoughts hopefully it was uh all making sense all right well thank you very much uh we know where to find you online um so let’s give one more class