Importance of the glucocorticoid stress response in a changing world: Theory, hypotheses and perspectives

• The glucocorticoid stress response (GCSR) promotes homeostasis.
• Global change is associated with changes in the regime of stressors.
• Global change may disrupt the efficiency of the GCSR to maintain homeostasis.
• The GCSR might be adjusted to new stressors through different mechanisms.
• Studying the GCSR helps understanding how global change affects different species.

In this perspective paper, we emphasize the importance that integrative mechanisms, and especially the GC (glucocorticoid) stress response, can play in the ability of vertebrates to cope with ongoing global change. The GC stress response is an essential mediator of allostasis (i.e., the responses of an organism to a perturbation) that aims at maintaining stability (homeostasis) despite changing conditions. The GC stress response is a complex mechanism that depends on several physiological components and aims at promoting immediate survival at the expense of other life-history components (e.g., reproduction) when a labile perturbation factor (LPF) occurs. Importantly, this mechanism is somewhat flexible and its degree of activation can be adjusted to the fitness costs and benefits that result from the GC stress response. Therefore, this GC stress response mediates life-history decisions and is involved in the regulation of important life-history trade-offs. By inducing abrupt and rapid changes in the regime of LPFs, we believe that global change can affect the efficiency of the GC stress response to maintain homeostasis and to appropriately regulate these trades-offs. This dysfunction may result in an important mismatch between new LPFs and the associated GC stress response and, thus, in the inability of vertebrates to cope with a changing world. In that context, it is essential to better understand how the GC stress response can be adjusted to new LPFs through micro-evolution, phenotypic plasticity and phenotypic flexibility (habituation and sensitization). This paper sets up a theoretical framework, hypotheses and new perspectives that will allow testing and better understanding how the GC stress response can help or constrain individuals, populations and species to adjust to ongoing global change.