Solar radiation stress in climbing snails behavio

Authors: Maddalena A Di Lellis Merav Seifan Sandra Troschinski Christophe Mazzia Yvan Capowiez Rita Triebskorn HeinzR Köhler

Publish Date: 2012/05/26

Volume: 17, Issue: 6, Pages: 717-727

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Abstract

Ectotherms from sunny and hot environments need to cope with solar radiation Mediterranean land snails of the superfamily Helicoidea feature a behavioural strategy to escape from solar radiationinduced excessive soil heating by climbing up vertical objects The height of climbing and also other parameters like shell colouration pattern shell orientation shell size body mass actual internal and shell surface temperature and the interactions between those factors may be expected to modulate proteotoxic effects in snails exposed to solar radiation and thus their stress response Focussing on natural populations of Xeropicta derbentina we conducted a ‘snapshot’ field study using the individual Hsp70 level as a proxy for proteotoxic stress In addition to correlation analyses an ITmodel selection approach based on Akaike’s Information Criterion was applied to evaluate a set of models with respect to their explanatory power and to assess the relevance of each of the abovementioned parameters for individual stress by model averaging and parameter estimation The analysis revealed particular importance of the individuals’ shell size height above ground the shell colouration pattern and the interaction height × orientation Our study showed that a distinct set of behavioural traits and intrinsic characters define the Hsp70 level and that environmental factors and individual features strongly interactWe are grateful to Tal Seifan for his help with the statistical analysis Nik Triebskorn and Tim Triebskorn assisted during sampling in the field Thanks go also to Lucile Delay for providing access to one of the sampling areas and to Thomas Wilke and Sergej Sereda Giessen University for molecular species determination The study was financed by the German Research Council DFG under KO 1978/53

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