Frédéric Angelier

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · CEBC

In wild vertebrates, some individuals survive and reproduce better than others and this has led to the concept of individual quality. Despite its importance when studying ecological processes and life‐history trade‐offs, measuring individual quality is complex because individuals must be followed during a large part of their life. Recently, telomer...

Following the discoveries of telomeres and of their implications in terms of health and ageing, there has been a growing interest into the study of telomere dynamics in wild vertebrates. Telomeres are repeated sequences of non-coding DNA located at the terminal ends of chromosomes and they play a major role in maintaining chromosome stability. Impo...

In vertebrates, adjustments of physiology and behavior to environmental changes are often mediated by physiology, and more specifically by hormonal mechanisms. As a consequence, these mechanisms are thought to orchestrate life-history decisions in wild vertebrates. For instance, investigating the hormonal regulation of parental behavior is relevant...

In this perspective paper, we emphasize the importance that integrative mechanisms, and especially the GC (glucocorticoid) stress response, can play in the ability of vertebrates to cope with ongoing global change. The GC stress response is an essential mediator of allostasis (i.e. the responses of an organism to a perturbation) that aims at mainta...

In this paper, we review the relationships that link avian parental behavior, stress (acute or chronic) and energetic constraints to the secretion of prolactin, the 'parental hormone'. Prolactin secretion is stimulated by exposure of the parent to tactile and visual stimuli from the nest, the eggs or the chicks, while prolactin facilitates/stimulat...

In wild vertebrates, the increase of breeding success with advancing age has been extensively studied through laying date, clutch size, hatching success, and fledging success. However, to better evaluate the influence of age on reproductive performance in species with high reproductive success, assessing not only reproductive success but also other...

This study, conducted in western France from 2018 to 2021, aimed to examine the environmental disruption risks faced by the European Kingfisher, a species of conservation concern in Europe. We focused on examining the risks associated with habitat reduction, as well as the potential exposure of the species to trace elements and organic pollutants,...

Phenotypic plasticity may enable individuals to cope with predictable and unpredictable environments during their life‐cycle. In that context, studying glucocorticoids—corticosterone (CORT) in birds—is relevant because of their primary role in allostasis. Higher baseline CORT levels are classically associated with environmental constraints and lowe...

There is growing evidence that poly and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure leads to the disruption of thyroid hormones including thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3), and may affect telomeres, repetitive nucleotide sequences which protects chromosome ends. Many seabird species are long-lived top predators thus exhibit high contaminant le...

Triazoles belong to a family of fungicides that are ubiquitous in agroecosystems due to their widespread use in crops. Despite their efficiency in controlling fungal diseases, triazoles are also suspected to affect non-target vertebrate species through the disruption of key physiological mechanisms. Most studies so far have focused on aquatic anima...

Introduction In Antarctica, there is growing concern about the potential effect of anthropogenic activities (i.e., tourism, research) on wildlife, especially since human activities are developing at an unprecedented rate. Although guidelines exist to mitigate negative impacts, fundamental data are currently lacking to reliably assess impacts. Physi...

Understanding how geographic range limits are shaped is a central and challenging question in ecology that has become particularly critical in the context of global environmental changes. A central hypothesis in several theories for range limitations is that the density, fitness and performance of individuals decrease towards the edge of the range...

The Arctic experiences a rapid retreat of sea-ice, particularly in spring and summer, which may dramatically affect pagophilic species. In recent years, the decline of many Arctic seabird populations has raised concerns about the potential role of sea-ice habitats on their demography. Spring sea-ice drives the dynamics of phytoplankton blooms, the...

In vertebrates, developmental conditions can have long-term effects on individual performance. It is increasingly recognized that oxidative stress could be one physiological mechanism connecting early-life experience to adult phenotype. Accordingly, markers of oxidative status could be useful for assessing the developmental constraints encountered...

There is great interest in measuring immune function in wild animals. Yet, field conditions often have methodological challenges related to handling stress, which can alter physiology. Despite general consensus that immune function is influenced by handling stress, previous studies have provided equivocal results. Furthermore, few studies have focu...

With 68% of the world's population expected to live in cities by 2050, it is crucial to understand how animals respond to urbanization. Urban areas are associated with changes in microclimate, light, noise and human activity, which can affect animal physiology, behaviour and fitness. In particular, urbanization may affect how parents allocate time...

Many animals migrate after reproduction to respond to seasonal environmental changes. Environmental conditions experienced on non-breeding sites can have carryover effects on fitness. Exposure to harmful chemicals can vary widely between breeding and non-breeding grounds, but its carryover effects are poorly studied. Mercury (Hg) contamination is a...

Animal-borne tagging (bio-logging) generates large and complex datasets. In particular, accelerometer tags, which provide information on behaviour and energy expenditure of wild animals, produce high-resolution multi-dimensional data, and can be challenging to analyse. We tested the performance of commonly used artificial intelligence tools on data...

Urban environments are evolutionarily novel and differ from natural environments in many respects including food and/or water availability, predation, noise, light, air quality, pathogens, biodiversity, and temperature. The success of organisms in urban environments requires physiological plasticity and adjustments that have been described extensiv...

Azoles represent the most used family of organic fungicides worldwide and they are used in agriculture to circumvent the detrimental impact of fungi on yields. Although it is known that these triazoles can contaminate the air, the soil, and the water, field data are currently and dramatically lacking to assess if, and to what extent, the use of tri...

The environment that animals experience during development shapes phenotypic expression. In birds, two important aspects of the early-developmental environment are lay-order sequence and incubation. Later-laid eggs tend to produce weaker offspring, sometimes with compensatory mechanisms to accelerate their growth rate to catch-up to their siblings....

Plastic and selective mechanisms govern parental investment adjustments to predation threat. We investigated the relative importance of plasticity and selection in risk-taking propensity of incubating female common eiders Somateria mollissima facing unprecedented predation in SW Finland, Baltic Sea. Using a 12-year individual-based dataset, we exam...

Triazole compounds are among the most widely used fungicides in agroecosystems to protect crops from potential fungal diseases. Many farmland birds spend a significant part of their life cycle in agroecosystems, which may chronically expose them to pesticides. We experimentally tested whether exposure to environmental concentrations of tebuconazole...

Assessing the determinants of reproductive success is critical but often complicated because of complex interactions between parental traits and environmental conditions occurring during several stages of a reproductive event. Here, we used a simplified ecological situation – an amphibian species lacking post-oviposition parental care – and a labor...

In the current context of global change, there is evidence of a large inter-individual variability in the way animals physiologically respond to anthropogenic changes. In that context, the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis and the corticosterone stress response are of primary importance because they are thought to govern the ability of indi...

Seasonal environments impose on animals the necessity to balance their energy expenditure and energy gain according to fluctuating environmental conditions. For species wintering in northern regions, winter can remain energetically challenging. Marine environments are characterized by high spatiotemporal heterogeneity in food availability and physi...

Aging is the price to pay for acquiring and processing energy through cellular activity and life history productivity. Climate warming can exacerbate the inherent pace of aging, as illustrated by a faster erosion of protective telomere DNA sequences. This biomarker integrates individual pace of life and parental effects through the germline, but wh...

Triazole compounds are among the most widely used fungicides in agroecosystems to protect crops from potential fungal diseases. Triazoles are suspected to have an impact on non‐target species due to their interactions with non‐fungal sterol synthesis and wild birds are likely to be contaminated by triazoles fungicides as many of them live in agroec...

Since the last Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) effort to review biological effects of mercury (Hg) on Arctic biota in 2011 and 2018, there has been a considerable number of new Arctic bird studies. This review article provides contemporary Hg exposure and potential health risk for 36 Arctic seabird and shorebird species, represent...

Mercury (Hg) is a toxic trace element widely distributed in the environment, which particularly accumulates in top predators, including seabirds. Among seabirds, large gulls (Larus sp) are generalist feeders, foraging in both terrestrial and marine habitats, making them relevant bioindicators of local coastal Hg contamination. In the present study,...

A historic debate in biology is the question of nature vs. nurture. Although it is now known that most traits are a product of both heredity (“nature”) and the environment (“nurture”), these two driving forces of trait development are rarely examined together. In birds, one important aspect of the early developmental environment is egg incubation t...

Heatwaves and droughts are becoming more intense and frequent with climate change. These extreme weather events often occur simultaneously and may alter organismal physiology, yet their combined impacts remain largely unknown. Here, we experimentally investigated physiological responses of a temperate ectotherm, the asp viper (Vipera aspis), to a s...

Environmental pollution is a global phenomenon that affects all continents and dozens of types of pollutants with highly different properties can be found on Earth. These pollutants may result in detrimental environmental conditions with clear negative effects on fitness, but they can also induce more pernicious and subtle effects by triggering mal...

Although early‐life adversity has been associated with negative consequences during adulthood, growing evidence shows that such adversity can also lead to subsequent stress resilience and positive fitness outcomes. Telomere dynamics are relevant in this context because of the link with developmental conditions and longevity. However, few studies ha...

Prenatal maternal stress (PMS) influences many facets of offspring’s’ phenotype including morphology, behaviour and cognitive abilities. Recent research suggested that PMS also induced epigenetic modifications. In the present study, we analysed, in the Japanese quail, the effects of PMS on the emotional reactivity and cognitive abilities of the F1...

Background Land-use change is one of the main drivers of the global erosion of biodiversity. In that context, it is crucial to understand how landscape characteristics drive the presence of rare endangered species. Nevertheless, it is also important to study common species in multiple habitats, because they represent a large proportion of biodivers...

Reproduction is one of the most energetically costly life history stages, which impose constraints, even outside the breeding period. Capital breeders typically accumulate energy in preparation for reproduction and the amount of body mass gain prior to reproduction partly determines reproductive outcome in such species. Understanding the physiologi...

Hormones mediate physiological and behavioral changes in adults as they transition into reproduction. In this study, we characterize the circulating levels of five key hormones involved in reproduction in rock doves ( Columba livia ): corticosterone, progesterone, estradiol, testosterone, and prolactin using univariate and multivariate approaches....

To understand the proximate mechanisms regulating brood desertion, we studied hormonal and behavioural stress responses during the chick-rearing period in adult Whiskered Terns (Chlidonias hybrida), a socially monogamous, semi-precocial species with prolonged post-fledging parental care. In contrast to males, almost all females of this species dese...

Anthropogenic alterations of habitats can have detrimental consequences for biodiversity. Documenting these effects require monitoring in multiple sites that vary in the degree of alterations over long temporal scales, a task that is challenging. Yet, simple naturalist observations can reveal major ongoing events affecting wild populations, and ser...

To comprehensively assess the impacts of agricultural practices on biodiversity in complex landscapes mixing both agricultural habitats and remnants of other (presumably more favorable) types of habitats, a prerequisite is to evaluate to which extent agricultural habitats are actually used by a given species. Here, we tested whether the stable isot...

Emerging infectious diseases are spreading at unprecedented rates and affecting wildlife worldwide, with particularly strong effects on islands. Since the introduction of avian malaria to Hawaii a century ago, the disease has contributed to the decline and extinction of several endemic Hawaiian honeycreeper species. At low elevation, where avian ma...

During breeding, multiple circulating hormones, including prolactin, facilitate reproductive transitions in species that exhibit parental care. Prolactin underlies parental behaviors and related physiological changes across many vertebrates, including birds and mammals. While circulating prolactin levels often fluctuate across breeding, less is kno...

Droughts are becoming more intense and frequent with climate change. These extreme weather events can lead to mass mortality and reproduction failure, and therefore cause population declines. Understanding how the reproductive physiology of organisms is affected by water shortages will help clarify whether females can adjust their reproductive stra...

Glyphosate's primary metabolite (aminomethylphosphonic acid, AMPA) is known to alter embryonic development at environmentally relevant concentrations in amphibians. However, we have limited understanding of the physiological mechanisms through which AMPA affects organisms. In this study, we tested whether alteration of the oxidative status is one m...

Defining the impact of anthropogenic stressors on Antarctic wildlife is an active aim for investigators. Telomeres represent a promising molecular tool to investigate the fitness of wild populations, as their length may predict longevity and survival. We examined the relationship between telomere length and human exposure in Adélie penguin chicks (...

Site fidelity is driven by predictable resource distributions in time and space. However, intrinsic factors related to an individual’s physiology and life-history traits can contribute to consistent foraging behaviour and movement patterns. Using 11 years of continuous geolocation tracking data (fall 2008 to spring 2019), we investigated spatiotemp...

Predation risk affects the costs and benefits of prey life-history decisions. Predation threat is often higher during reproduction, especially in conspicuous colonial breeders. Therefore, predation risk may increase the survival cost of breeding, and reduce parental investment. The impact of predation risk on avian parental investment decisions may...

Conditions experienced during early development can lead to profound long-lasting changes in physiology and behaviour. The extent to which such “programming” effects are transmitted to the next generation remains largely unexplored. Here, we assessed whether maternal exposure to elevated corticosterone stress hormone during early post-natal develop...

Increasing urbanisation and human pressure on lands have huge impacts on biodiversity. Some species, known as “urban exploiters”, manage to expand in urban landscapes, relying on human resources. The House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is the perfect example of a human-commensal species. Surprisingly, this urban exploiter has been declining all over...

In the context of increasing urbanization, preserving urban biodiversity has become a priority because biodiversity appears to be a key element when evaluating the well-being of urban residents. Recently, urban management has relied on a ‘renaturing’ strategy to improve biodiversity, but the benefits of these policies remain debated. In this study,...

Understanding how vulnerable species are to new stressors, such as anthropogenic changes, is crucial for mitigating their potential negative consequences. Many studies have investigated species sensitivity to human disturbance by focusing on single behavioral or physiological parameters, such as flight initiation distance and glucocorticoid levels....

In altricial species, parents brood their chicks constantly before leaving them unattended sometimes for extended periods when they become thermally independent. During this second phase, there is sometimes important inter-individual differences in parental attendance and the fitness costs and benefits of parental strategies have previously been ex...

Some parasites are known to bioaccumulate some environmental pollutants within their host. We hypothesized that these parasites may be beneficial for their hosts in polluted environments. We experimentally increased long-term (five weeks) exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, three levels: 0.1X, 1X, 10X environmental exposure) in Euro...

Glucocorticoids, androgens, and prolactin regulate metabolism and reproduction, but they also play critical roles in immunomodulation. Since the introduction of avian malaria to Hawaii a century ago, low elevation populations of the Hawaii Amakihi (Chlorodrepanis virens) that have experienced strong selection by avian malaria have evolved increased...

Reproductive success is often related to parental quality, a parameter expressed through various traits, such as site selection, mate selection and energetic investment in the eggs or progeny. Owing to the complex interactions between environmental and parental characteristics occurring at various stages of the reproductive event, it is often compl...

Environmental pressures, such as urbanization and exposure to pollutants may jeopardize survival of free-living animals. Yet, much remains to be known about physiological and ecological responses to currently-released pollutants, especially in wild vertebrate ectotherms. We tested the effect of urbanization and pollution (phthalates, organochlorine...

Per‐ and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are associated with several disrupted physiological and endocrine parameters. Regarding endocrine mechanisms, laboratory studies suggest that PFASs could disrupt the thyroid hormone (TH) system and alter circulating TH concentrations. THs play a ubiquitous role—controlling thermoregulation, metabolism, an...

Telomere length variation has been implicated in processes of ecological and evolutionary importance in a wide range of organisms. However, while the temporal component of this variation has been the subject of much research, we do not know yet whether a spatial component exists within species in telomere dynamics. Here, we investigated for the fir...

Energy drives behaviour and life history decisions, yet it can be hard to measure at fine scales in free-moving animals. Accelerometry has proven a powerful tool to estimate energy expenditure, but requires calibration in the wild. This can be difficult in some environments, or for particular behaviours, and validations have produced equivocal resu...

Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) raised increasing concerns over the past years due to their persistence and global distribution. Understanding their occurrence in the environment and their disruptive effect on the physiology of humans and wildlife remains a major challenge in ecotoxicological studies. Here, we investigate the occurrence...

In the last decade, house sparrow populations have shown a general decline, especially in cities. Avian malaria has been recently suggested as one of the potential causes of this decline, and its detrimental effects could be exacerbated in urban habitats. It was initially thought that avian malaria parasites would not have large negative effects on...

Environmental factors that can influence telomeres are diverse, but the association between telomeres and exposure to environmental contaminants is far to be elucidated. To date, prior studies focused on legacy persistent chlorinated pollutants POPs, while the effects of poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have poorly been documented. Here,...

Freshwater fish face multiple challenges in human-altered rivers such as trace metal contamination, temperature increase and parasitism. These multiple stressors could have unexpected interactive effects on fish health due to shared physiological pathways, but few studies investigated this question in wild fish populations. In this study, we compar...

In vertebrates, developmental conditions can affect not only fledging success but also the phenotype of the offspring, with potential long-term consequences on adult performance. However, surprisingly the potential impact of anthropogenic disturbance on developing chicks is rarely investigated, notably in Antarctic wildlife. In this study, we speci...

To maximize fitness, parents may trade-off time and energy between parental care and self-maintenance. In vertebrates, prolactin and corticosterone are two important hormones that regulate parental investment because they stimulate parental care and mobilize energy, respectively. Further, concentrations of both hormones change in response to distur...

In wild vertebrates, several species exhibit eumelanic color polymorphism with the coexistence of dark and light morphs. The maintenance of such polymorphism suggests the existence of a selective balance between the morphs and a large body of literature has reported the costs and benefits of darker plumage coloration in birds. Among them, it has be...

Animals use a variety of strategies to avoid acute dehydration and death. Yet, how chronic exposure to sub-lethal dehydration may entail physiological and fitness costs remains elusive. In this study, we experimentally tested if water restriction causes increased oxidative stress (OS) and telomere length (TL) shortening, two well-described mediator...

In the last decade, house sparrow populations have shown a general decline, especially in cities. Avian malaria has been recently suggested as one of the potential causes and its detrimental effects could be exacerbated in urban habitats. Due to their long co-evolution with their hosts, it was initially suggested that these parasites would have lim...

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is one of the most important physiological mechanisms for mediating life-history trade-offs by reallocating resources to immediate survival from other life-history components during a perturbation. Early-life stressor experience and associated upregulation of glucocorticoids can induce short- and long-t...

Incubating eggs represents a trade-off for parent birds between spending enough time fasting to take care of the clutch and to get enough nutrients for self-maintenance. It is believed that the pituitary hormone prolactin plays an important role in such allocation processes. Incubation does not solely imply the active warming of the eggs but also t...

In birds and other vertebrates, there is good evidence that females adjust the allocation of hormones in their eggs in response to prenatal environmental conditions, such as food availability or male phenotype, with profound consequences for life history traits of offspring. In insects, there is also evidence that females deposit juvenile hormones...

Future environmental variations linked to climate change are expected to influence precipitation regimes, and thus drinking water availability. Dehydration can be a particularly challenging physiological state for most organisms, yet no study has examined the effect of dehydration on the functioning of the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal axis in wil...

Life-history theory predicts that, to optimize their fitness, individuals should increase their reproductive effort as their residual reproductive value decreases. Accordingly, several studies have shown that individuals downregulate their glucocorticoid stress response (a proxy of reproductive investment in vertebrates) as they age, and as the sub...