Assessing the seasonal and intrinsic variability of neurotoxic and cyto-genotoxic biomarkers in blood of free-living Eleonoras’ falcons

Potential Use of Distinct Biomarkers (Trace Metals, Micronuclei and Nuclear Abnormalities) in a Heterogeneous Sample of Birds in Southern Brazil.

“…The NA most frequently found in this study (notched nucleus and binucleated cells) were also the most representative abnormalities in a community of birds from a desert environment (Quero et al 2016) and in a falcon species from an island environment (Tsarpali et al 2020). Notched nucleus was the second most frequent NA found in a falcon species in an agricultural area (Frixione and Rodríguez-Estrella 2020), but the causes and the mechanism behind the formation of this abnormality are unknown (Quero et al 2016).…”

“…The mainly results in our study were mainly related to the diet. Therefore, in studies using birds as bioindicators, we recommend that researchers focus on one or a few species which have well-known speci c characteristics, like the forage area and feeding preferences (Tsarpali et al 2020; Frixione e Rodríguez-Estrella, 2020).…”

“…Santos et al (2017) reported that juveniles of white stork (Ciconia ciconia) in the process of rehabilitation presented higher frequencies of NA and MN than adults. In a falcon species the MN frequency in juveniles was higher than in adults (Tsarpali et al 2020). Zúñiga-González et al (2000) comment that this result is might be attributable to the reticuloendothelial system (involved with the removal of old erythrocytes from the blood), which only matures in older birds, so juveniles would not be able to eliminate damaged and old erythrocytes so e ciently as the adults.…”

“…Some authors have made efforts to evaluate the potential of birds as bioindicators by capturing a great number of species, but they rarely succeeded in identifying a good bioindicator species for genotoxic damage (Baesse et al 2015) or in determining a species more sensitive to metal contamination (Abbasi et al 2015a; Grúz et al 2018). Other authors have restricted their attention to only one or a few species (Tsarpali et al 2020;Mukhtar et al 2020) and were able to achieve more robust conclusions, which is mainly attributed to known biological characteristics of the target species (Frixione and Rodríguez-Estrella 2020).…”

“…Age is also an important factor for MN an NA. Different generations might present different levels of these alterations (Santos et al 2017;Tsarpali et al 2020). MN and NA increased with the reduction of the age classes in aquatic birds (Santos et al 2017), however, few studies tried to establish this relation.…”