Meeting Abstract
The stress axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) plays a central role in how vertebrates integrate environmental change and implement decisions on when to reproduce, grow, and allocate energy into storage. It allows animals to cope with change and challenges in the face of both certain and uncertain environments. Furthermore, the stress axis may play a central role in developmental plasticity, via prenatal exposure to maternally derived stress (MDS) hormones or via early post-natal exposure to stressors. Both situations are sensitive periods of development and exposure to stress hormones at these times can permanently alter an individual’s physiology and behavior for life. Given the large contribution by the medical community to the literature, many of the phenotypic responses to early life stress (pre- or early post-natal) are viewed as unavoidable negative outcomes by the ecological community. However, the ecological and environmental contexts of such effects are often overlooked and thus the adaptive potential is largely underestimated. Here I will present emerging evidence across a variety of taxa that prenatal exposure to MDS can result in adaptive phenotypes in offspring. Further, I will present results from rats showing that exposure to chronic stress during adolescence has life-long effects, adaptively altering adult foraging behavior and performance. Critical to our understanding of these effects is the adaptive potential of these phenotypic responses for future environmental contexts: the greater the match between early and future conditions, the greater the adaptive potential of the offspring’s phenotypic response.
