Endocrine flexibility can facilitate or constrain the ability to cope with global change.

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0502. This is version 1 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Conor Claverie Taff, Davide Baldan, Lucia Mentesana, Jenny Ouyang, Maren Vitousek, Michaela Hau

Abstract

Global climate change has increased average environmental temperatures world-wide, simultaneously intensifying temperature variability and extremes. Growing numbers of studies have documented phenological, behavioral, and morphological responses to climate change in wild populations. As systemic signals, hormones can contribute to orchestrating many of these phenotypic changes. Yet little is known about whether mechanisms like hormonal flexibility (reversible changes in hormone concentrations) facilitate or limit the ability of individuals, populations, and species to cope with a changing climate. In this perspective, we discuss different mechanisms by which hormonal flexibility, primarily in glucocorticoids, could promote versus hinder evolutionary adaptation to changing temperature regimes. We focus on temperature because it is a key gradient influenced by climate change, easy to quantify, and links to hormones are well established. We argue that reaction norm studies that connect individual responses to population-level and species-wide patterns will be critical for making progress in this field. We also develop a case study on urban heat islands, where several key questions regarding hormonal flexibility and adaptation to climate change can be addressed. Understanding the mechanisms that allow animals to cope when conditions become more challenging will help in predicting which populations are vulnerable to ongoing climate change.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/X2DC7S

Subjects

Life Sciences

Keywords

physiological flexibility, global climate change, within-individual reaction norms, coping ability, global climate change, within-individual reaction norms, coping ability

Dates

Published: 2023-10-30 14:54

Last Updated: 2023-10-30 18:54

License

CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Language:
English

Conflict of interest statement:
None

Data and Code Availability Statement:
Not applicable.