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Hi Boris,

It's hair cortisol so it shouldn't have an effect. My study species are ungulates, which retain their coat through the winter into the spring shedding out around April/May so in theory these two sampling periods should provide the same results as hair cort provides an average of accumulated cort levels released into the hair over that growth period until they shed out. Of course the individuals that had hair collected in March instead of December have had longer to incorporate more cort levels into the hair collected in comparison to their conspecifics captured in December.

I had a repeated measures approach to this previously but due to missing data from uneven captures the model gets angry since there's only 2 levels of replication and many are not repeated at all. We're considering dividing up the dataset by season to eliminate the need for repeated measures. I've had it suggested that we should use the single measure of cort (which is what most individuals have) in both rows (March and December) based on this logic, and then just run the models as separate seasons.

I ran the t-test between the march and december cort samples and they are not representing the same information.

The joys of data analysis!

Thanks for your feedback,

Carolyn J. Miller
M.S. Student, Ecology
SUNY-ESF, Environmental Biology