Scientists have recently developed an evolutionary framework to forecast how animals respond to a stressful situation or condition.
According to the study featured in EurekAlert!, nearly all organisms have fast-acting reactions to stress, which help them react to threats. However, being stressed makes use of energy - and chronic stress - the study authors specified, can be damaging.
This new research by an international group, which includes the University of Exeter, proposes that most animals stay stressed for a longer time than is optimum following a stress-inducing occurrence.
Reasons for such an incident remain unclear, although one probability is that there is a restriction to how fast the body can eliminate stress hormones from circulation.
How Organisms Progressed to Address Stressful Events
According to the University of Exeter's Dr. Tim Fawcett, they have developed one of the initial mathematical models to understand how organisms have progressed to address stressful occurrences.
In addition, Fawcett explained, it combines available studies on stress physiology in a diversity of organisms that have assessment of optimum reactions that stabilize the costs and benefits of stress.
The expert also said they know stress reactions differ significantly between different species and even animals of the same species as see in humans.
This study is considered as a step towards finding out and understanding further why stress reactions are adjustable or changeable.
Furthermore, in their work, the study authors defined stress as a process of reacting to 'stressors' of an organism, including reaction to both detection and stress itself. Stressors are threats and challenges experienced in an environment.
Predictability of Threats
A key point underscored in this research is the essentiality of how foreseeable threats are. The model proposed that an animal residing in a dangerous surrounding need to have a "high 'baseline' stress level."
Meanwhile, a specific animal living in a safer environment would benefit from being able to raise and lower levels of stress quickly.
The study's lead author, University of Bern's Professor Barbara Taborsky said, their approach uncovers "environmental predictability, as well as physiological restrictions as key factors" forming the stress reactions' evolution.
She added, more studies are needed for the progress of scientific understanding of the manner this fundamental physiological system has evolved.
Previous Studies on Link Between Stress Levels and Animals
In the past years, the University of Exeter conducted a study on stress linked specifically to mongooses. Specifically, Dr. Jennifer Sanderson has been examining wild banded mongooses to find out why working hard makes these animals less likely to work hard in the future.
Specifically, scientists investigating banded mongooses in Uganda have found that the said animals working hard to take care of their pups may be less likely to exert more effort in future offspring in a similar way because of their elevated stress hormones.
As a result, Sanderson found out that when a banded mongoose invested heavily to care for mongoose pups, it goes through a rise in circulating stress hormones, also known as 'glucocorticoids.'
More so, these high levels of stress constrain the same investment in the future. The said research findings came out in the Functional Ecology journal of the British Ecological Society.
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