Genetic differences in coping strategies in response to prolonged and repeated restraint in Japanese quail divergently selected for long or short tonic immobility

Abstract Exposure to fearful situations elicits behavioral and Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal (HPA) axis responses characteristic of the coping response of individual animals to counteract environmental challenges. The aim of this study was to investigate behavioral and corticotropic responses concomitantly following prolonged or repeated restraint stress by placing two genotypes of Japanese quail divergently selected for long (LTI) or short (STI) duration of tonic immobility (TI) in a crush cage. In our study, STI quail exhibited higher corticosterone (CORT) levels than LTI quail in response to prolonged restraint. STI quail struggled sooner and much more than LTI quail, and struggling behavior in STI quail progressively decreased during the course of restraint whereas LTI quail displayed very little struggling behavior in the crush cage. LTI quail are thus more likely to adopt a passive behavior coping strategy upon exposure to threat whereas STI quail behave more as active copers. The corticosterone responses shown by LTI and STI quail under restraint stress suggest that adrenocortical correlates of coping behavior in these genotypes of quail may be different from the coping styles previously described in other species. Repeated restraint slightly decreased CORT responses to stress in all experimental groups, but more markedly in male STI quail, whereas adrenal sensitivity and maximum adrenal corticosterone response capacity did not change in any group. On the other hand, neither behavioral habituation nor sensitization processes occurred in the context of repeated restraint in female and male LTI quail and female STI quail, whereas the decreases observed in some behavioral responses were interpreted to be the result of a habituation process in male STI quail.