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 ...