Meeting: It's about Time: Understanding Temporal Variation in Animal Behavior, Anchorage, Alaska, June 15, 2015

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

ABSTRACT It's about time: Understanding temporal variation in animal behavior In animal behavior, when something happens and for how long it happens can be just as important as what happens. The timing and duration of behavioral change can determine whether that change is beneficial or detrimental. A greater focus on temporal aspects of behavior will clarify how animals respond to their changing environment, how individuals in a group respond to one another, and how behavior influences other important traits like physiology and immunity. By bringing together researchers from diverse fields of study, the symposium and workshop at the 2015 Animal Behavior Society Meeting will increase focus on temporal aspects of behavior, generate new approaches to studying behavioral variation over time, and apply those insights to a broad range of topics. An additional facet of the workshop will involve professional development for early career researchers. Understanding the behavior of individuals requires quantifying how behavior changes over time. However, the temporal dimension of behavioral variation is often ignored. When researchers do address temporal variation in behavior, they do so in distinctly different ways, such as measuring time trends, circadian rhythms, or predictability. Integrating these different temporal patterns and other fields of animal behavior will provide a greater understanding of the causes and consequences of behavioral variation. For example, integration between circadian rhythms and animal personality has resulted in study on individual chronotypes, which promises to have biomedical impacts and implications for the ecology and evolution of animal behavior. The workshop and symposium activities will extend current points of integration and create new ones. The goals of the symposium and workshop are to 1) outline important unresolved temporal issues in animal behavior, 2) facilitate integration among fields that explicitly study temporal variation in behavior and those that are impacted by temporal variation, and 3) arm researchers with tools to experimentally test and analyze temporal patterns of behavior.