Recipient name: cincinnati ZOO and botanical gardencooperative agreement number: G24AC00593PROJECT title: using comprehensive veterinary records in tandem with serum cytokine data to identify…

Recipient name: cincinnati ZOO and botanical gardencooperative agreement number: G24AC00593PROJECT title: using comprehensive veterinary records in tandem with serum cytokine data to identify indicators of fitness in polar bears overall project period: 09 27 2024 09 25 2026OVERALL budget period: 09 27 2024 09 25 2026AWARD purpose: better analytical approaches are needed to understand how a rapidly changing climate is affecting polar bear health. Environmental and anthropogenic stressors can affect the health, fitness, and reproductive success of polar bears. However, a deficiency in monitoring techniques indicative of morbidity and or mortality impedes thorough assessment of health. In free-ranging wildlife, disease processes are difficult to detect, given limited accessibility to individual animals. Because of that, there has been limited progress in developing new analytical approaches for better characterizing physiological functioning (and disfunction) of most species. The proposed study seeks to develop an improved approach for characterizing the physiological function of polar bears, using a large data sample set collected from bears housed in zoos. The results from such a study can be used to inform the development of better disease monitoring efforts that address recovery objectives in the USFWS polar bear conservation management plan (USFWS 2016, pages 32 and 50).activities to be performed:1.use blood and serum biomarker data from healthy, ZOO-managed polar bears to establish reference intervals for commonly assessed biochemical analytes following the methods of FRY ET AL. (2019). 2.use clinical records from ZOO-managed polar bears to: identify thresholds for biochemical analytes that indicate pathophysiological responses and compare biochemical analytes to serum cytokine multiplex concentrations. 3.use thresholds developed from ZOO bear populations to draw comparisons between and make inferences about wild polar bear population health. Deliverables and expected outcomes:1.documented computer code and data sets on all products.2.a final report including: -all results and documentation of methodology. -biomarker values that are indicative of disease.-candidate biomarkers (and reference ranges) predictive of health and disease and-a proposed health monitoring plan using candidate biomarkers.3.manuscripts prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal if analyses permit such dissemination of results.intended beneficiary(IES): the USGS, the public and polar bears.