Data from: A field-friendly method of measuring faecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentration as a simple stress checker in snow leopards

Hormonal analysis of excrement has been employed to noninvasively assess
the physiological conditions of domestic, experimental, zoo, and wild
animals to. However, conventional hormone analysis techniques require
frozen and refrigerated reagents, and laboratory equipment; therefore, it
is almost impossible to obtain the results on-site. This study attempted
to establish a method for the simple and rapid quantitative on-site
analysis of faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGM) concentrations; this
method involved using hand-shaking for faecal hormone extraction, and
immunochromatography using test strips and a smartphone application. This
study focused specifically on snow leopards and developed a new, simple
fGM measurement method to evaluate their stress levels on-site. First, the
effects of ultraviolet exposure and bacterial activity on fGM
concentration, including sample age, were evaluated using faeces from a
captive snow leopard. Second, a field-friendly hormone extraction method
was evaluated; this method does not require storage of faeces in the field
because the hormones are extracted by hand-shaking of faeces in ethanol at
the time of collection. In addition, to measure hormone concentrations
on-site, a simple immunochromatography measurement kit was used. The
concentrations were measured by quantifying the colour reactions using a
smartphone application. There was no consistent increase or decrease in
fGM concentration with ultraviolet irradiation time. In addition, a high
correlation was observed between concentrations extracted using the
conventional method (using a vortex mixer and methanol extraction) and
those from the field-friendly method (r = 0.812, P < 0.05). Changes
in fGM concentration measured using immunochromatography were also highly
consistent with those measured using the conventional method
(enzyme-immunoassay) (r = 0.825, P < 0.05). The analytical
validation of immunochromatography also showed high accuracy, i.e.
parallelism (ANCOVA: F = 0.597, df = 1, P = 0.445) and recovery tests
(98.2% ± 5.1% and 107.5% ± 18.7%). Further, for biological validation, the
change in fGM concentration was examined before and after the
transportation of the snow leopards to another zoo. This field-friendly
hormone analysis method is expected to contribute as a simple and rapid
stress evaluation tool to manage conservation and animal welfare by
monitoring the stress levels.