Upper respiratory tract nociceptor stimulation and stress response following acute and repeated Cyfluthrin inhalation in normal and pregnant rats: Physiological rat-specific adaptions can easily be misunderstood as adversities

•Acute chemosensations trigger adaptive responses in thermolabile rodents which could be misunderstood as adversity.•Such sensations are dependent on afferent noceceptive threshold concentration.•Threshold concentrations after single and repeated exposure of rats were indistinguishable.•While the afferent stimulation thresholds were similar, their efferents were species-specifically different.•Developmental inhalation toxicity studies have to observe rat-specific adaptive changes in the dams’ physiology.