“…The high level of connectivity observed in Basal-HS decreased in birds under heat stress and supplemented dietary thymol (compare Fig 7B,D,F,H). The modulation observed is consistent with the more general framework indicative of the antagonistic multiscale and scale-dependent effects of heat stress and thymol supplementation, influencing from gene expression and metabolic pathways to the whole-organism (see [14,18,27,46–51,19–26] for heat stress, [16,33,42–44,34–41] for thymol, and [21,45,53,54,62] for their combination). However, our experimental approach allowed us to further demonstrate that the resultant non-linear combination of constraints imposed on the system by both factors emerges as a more variable or “less coordinated” response pattern (i.e., lower level of correlations among traits and subsystems, lower entropy and connectivity, general absence of dominant nodes) in comparison to the Basal-HS.…”