Abstract
Organisms can behaviorally, physiologically, and morphologically adjust to environmental variation via integrative hormonal mechanisms, ultimately allowing animals to cope with environmental change. The stress response to environmental and social changes commonly promotes survival at the expense of reproduction. However, despite climate change impacts on population declines and diversity loss, few studies have attributed hormonal stress responses, or their regulatory effects, to climate change in the wild. Here, we report hormonal and fitness responses of individual wild fish to a recent large-scale sea warming event that caused widespread bleaching on coral reefs. This 14-month monitoring study shows a strong correlation between anemone bleaching (zooxanthellae loss), anemonefish stress response, and reproductive hormones that decreased fecundity by 73%. These findings suggest that hormone stress responses play a crucial role in changes to population demography following climate change and plasticity in hormonal responsiveness may be a key mechanism enabling individual acclimation to climate change.
Highlights
IntroductionMorphologically adjust to environmental variation via integrative hormonal mechanisms, allowing animals to cope with environmental change
Organisms can behaviorally, physiologically, and morphologically adjust to environmental variation via integrative hormonal mechanisms, allowing animals to cope with environmental change
Due to their multiple regulatory effects on an individual’s biology, glucocorticoid hormones (GCs) play a crucial role in enabling vertebrates to cope with and respond to climate change in the wild
Summary
Morphologically adjust to environmental variation via integrative hormonal mechanisms, allowing animals to cope with environmental change. We report hormonal and fitness responses of individual wild fish to a recent large-scale sea warming event that caused widespread bleaching on coral reefs This 14-month monitoring study shows a strong correlation between anemone bleaching (zooxanthellae loss), anemonefish stress response, and reproductive hormones that decreased fecundity by 73%. The stress axis aims at maintaining stability (homeostasis) despite changing conditions, such that recurring elevations of GCs that lead to a chronically elevated GC baseline, trigger physiological effects that promote immediate survival at the expense of reproduction[7, 8] Due to their multiple regulatory effects on an individual’s biology, GCs play a crucial role in enabling vertebrates (e.g., seabirds[9, 10] and marine iguanas11, 12) to cope with and respond to climate change in the wild. Individual differences in GC responses to environmental stressors will be the key factor in understanding whether and how populations can cope with climate change
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