Meeting Abstract
We are fast approaching the 100-year anniversary for using the word “stress” to describe the suite of behavioral, physiological, and endocrine responses of animals to noxious environmental stimuli. Biomedicine has made substantial progress during these years in understanding and defining stress in humans and laboratory animals. The growing consensus has settled on a theoretical model that emphasizes three main features: stressors, characterized by unpredictability and uncontrollability, that initiate a response; a suite of responses elicited by stressors that help the animal survive; and the pathological consequences of the overuse of that suite of responses (chronic stress). However, this model has had poor success in predicting and explaining data from wild animals coping with their natural environments – animals that are often scared, cold, and hungry. Decades of data from different species and different habitats have shown why the traditional biomedical model is insufficient. This insufficiency led to the development of Reactive Scope, a model of stress that focuses on the wear-and-tear inherent to utilizing a stress response. Reactive Scope can improve the predictions and interpretations of stress responses in wild, freely-behaving animals.
