Data from: Multiscale evaluation of thermal dependence in the glucocorticoid response of vertebrates

Environmental temperature has profound effects on animal physiology,
ecology, and evolution. Glucocorticoid (GC) hormones, through effects on
phenotypic performance and life history, provide fundamental vertebrate
physiological adaptations to environmental variation, yet we lack a
comprehensive understanding of how temperature influences GC regulation in
vertebrates. Using field studies and meta- and comparative phylogenetic
analyses, we investigated how acute change and broadscale variation in
temperature correlated with baseline and stress-induced GC levels.
Glucocorticoid levels were found to be temperature and taxon dependent,
but generally, vertebrates exhibited strong positive correlations with
acute changes in temperature. Furthermore, reptile baseline, bird
baseline, and capture stress-induced GC levels to some extent covaried
with broadscale environmental temperature. Thus, vertebrate GC function
appears clearly thermally influenced. However, we caution that lack of
detailed knowledge of thermal plasticity, heritability, and the basis for
strong phylogenetic signal in GC responses limits our current
understanding of the role of GC hormones in species' responses to
current and future climate variation.