I am happy to report the publication of two new pieces of original research from the Dantzer Lab. The first manuscript (here) that just came out in Ecology & Evolution was the result of a fun collaboration with Michael Sheriff (Penn State), John Orrock (Univ Wisconsin, Madison), and Oliver Love (Univ Windsor). The aim of this manuscript was to introduce error management theory to the large crowd that studies the effects of elevated maternal glucocorticoids (c0lloquially called “stress hormones”) on offspring. We provided a new framework with new predictions to understand when and where we might expect to find that offspring would respond to elevated maternal glucocorticoids and why these types of “stress-mediated maternal effects” might evolve.
The second manuscript (here) also just came out in Ecology & Evolution was the result of a collaboration with Aura Raulo (PhD student at Univ Oxford) that started nearly 4 years ago. This review manuscript discusses the potential consequences of elevated levels of glucocorticoids (again, colloquially called “stress hormones”) on the expression of a variety of social behaviors such as willingness to approach members of your same species, monogamous relationships, parental care, or cooperative behavior in highly social species. There is admittedly a lot of work to do in this area such as quantitative meta-analyses using the data we provide but we thought this manuscript serves as a good jumping off point for those interested in this topic.
Both of these are review papers that were a lot of fun to write. Writing and learning from your collaborators is one of my favorite parts of the scientific process.