Data from: Multi-scale evaluation of thermal dependence in the vertebrate glucocorticoid response

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, meta-, and comparative phylogenetic analyses we investigated how acute change and broad-scale variation in temperature correlated with baseline and stress-induced GC levels. GC levels were found to be temperature and taxon dependent, but generally vertebrates exhibited strong positive correlations with acute increases in temperature. Furthermore, reptile baseline and bird baseline and capture stress induced GC levels to some extent co-varied with broad-scale environmental temperature. Thus vertebrate GC function is clearly thermally dependent. 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.