Meeting: SICB 2014 parasitic manipulation symposium, Austin, Texas, 3-7 January 2014

The University Of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports the symposium "Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie", to be held at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference on 3-7 January 2014, in Austin, Texas. Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on the planet, so much so that nearly all animals are infected by parasites. Many parasites change the behaviors of the animals in which they live in ways that help the parasites. For example, one species of fungus makes ants it infects leave the ant colony, climb up to a leaf, clamp its jaws on a leaf, and stay there until the ant dies in just the right place for the fungus to spread its spores. This sort of ability to control a host far surpasses anything biologists have been able to achieve, so parasites may have much to teach us about how to change behaviors. This symposium will bring together twelve scientists from around the world to give presentations, with the goal of understanding how parasites can change the behavior of their hosts, and what the consequences of those behavioral changes might be. The symposium will help bring in expertise from outside of the field of parasitology (including behavioral ecologists, immunologists, neurobiologists, ecologists, invertebrate biologists, vertebrate biologists, and evolutionary biologists) to provide a more complete picture of how parasites manipulate their hosts. There are plans for a complementary workshop on parasite identification (geared towards students) and a poster session to the symposium, allowing others to present related findings. Papers from the symposium will be published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. Parasite manipulation is routinely featured in popular press, and science journalists are interested in covering this event.