Symposium: Plant and Animal Physiology Ecology, Comparative Physiology/ Biochemistry, and Evolutionary Physiology, to be held Jan 2001, Chicago, IL

Society For Integrative And Comparative Biology, Herndon VA

Investigators

Abstract

Biologists who study the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom may work in different worlds, attend separate meetings, belong to separate societies, and interact little with one another. Each community of biologists has developed insights and paradigms that could be extremely valuable to the other -- but are too seldom shared. At the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Chicago, the symposium on "Plant and animal physiological ecology, comparative physiology/biochemistry, and evolutionary physiology: opportunities for synergy" will break through this isolation by bringing together ambassadors from the plant biology and animal biology worlds. This symposium was jointly arranged by the largely plant-oriented Physiological Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America and the largely animal-oriented Division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and follows a parallel workshop at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Snowbird, UT, in August. The key to this symposium is that plants and animals have evolved from common ancestors and have much similar biological machinery in their cells, but interact with their environments in very different ways. Plants usually must stay in one place (except for their seeds and pollen) and thus must tolerate whatever challenges their environment presents. By contrast, many (but not all) animals can move and use behavior to escape from or respond to environmental challenges. Both plants and animals have developed a wide array of chemical and physical defenses against environmental stress. Scientists who have studied either plants or animals have made spectacular discoveries about how each kingdom responds to environmental challenges and live in diverse environments. This symposium will bring together distinguished ecophysiologists from the plant and animal ecophysiology communities, in hopes of bringing new perspectives to these fields and stimulating new advances in each. The design of this symposium is an unusual one. Teams of biologists, each including both plant scientists and animal scientists, will consider four related scientific issues of fundamental significance: How do or will organisms respond to global climate change? How do organisms sense that their environment has changed, and how do they coordinate the activities of their diverse cells in response? How can organisms turn themselves off temporarily in response to stress, and what does this mean to their populations? How can organisms respond to extraordinarily severe if not lethal environments? Each team will present broad and synthetic outlooks from their diverse perspectives. The plant member(s) and the animal member(s) will address the topic from the perspectives and paradigms prevalent in his/her field. Each pair or trio of presentations will conclude with a formal discussion led by an assigned discussant, and the entire symposium will culminate in a plenary discussion. Manuscripts based on the symposium presentations will be published in American Zoologist and thus undergo widespread dissemination beyond the meeting proper.