Urbanization presents both opportunities and challenges for wildlife that have implications for behavior, physiology, morphology, and overall fitness. Responses to urbanization can vary widely among urban adaptors, yet studies integrating multiple measures of immunological, endocrinological, and fitness-related traits remain limited, especially in non-avian reptiles. We tested for alterations in innate immunity, stress physiology, morphology and reproduction in western fence lizards, Sceloporus occidentalis , across an urban-rural gradient in Santa Barbara, California, USA. We found that agglutination via natural antibodies differed across the urban gradient in a sex-specific manner, with females showing an increase with urbanization and males a decrease. Complement-mediated lysis, baseline blood glucose in spring and summer, and summer baseline corticosterone did not differ across the urban gradient. However, there was a significant positive correlation between urbanization and spring corticosterone. There were also notable alterations in life-history traits with respect to urbanization, with urban lizards exhibiting smaller body sizes, lower egg volume, and lower clutch volume, though body condition and clutch size were unaffected. Additionally, lizards in more urban environments had lower prevalence of both ticks and mites. We evaluate our findings within the context of current research on urbanization emphasizing the influence of parasite prevalence, anthropogenic stressors, and pace-of-life, and evaluate their utility for a deeper understanding of the manner in which western fence lizards have adjusted to anthropogenic landscape change.
Sparkman et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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