Meeting: A Bigger Picture: Organismal Function at the Nexus of Development, Ecology, and Evolution; Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology; Portland, Oregon; January 2016

Society For Integrative And Comparative Biology, Herndon VA

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides partial support for a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in Portland, Oregon in January 2016 entitled, "A bigger picture: Organismal function at the nexus of development, ecology, and evolution." The symposium will focus on a fundamental question in integrative biology: What links the developmental stability and instability of phenotypes with the patterns of morphological diversity seen across the tree of life? The symposium will constitute a platform to foster dialogue and collaborations among junior and senior career scientists conducting cutting-edge research on the ontogeny, function, and evolution of phenotypes. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, the SICB meeting is an ideal venue for the symposium. Importantly, the symposium will be the first to help recruit Native American undergraduates to attend the meeting and to provide a mentoring framework for these first-time minority student attendees. Through an explicit assessment of these activities, the symposium will also aid in creating a model of direct intellectual and financial support for future conference participation by students of underrepresented groups. Comparative anatomists tend to approach the question of ontogenic and morphologic diversity from one of two perspectives. For key anatomical complexes (e.g., feeding apparatus, locomotor systems, sensory structures), morphological changes during ontogeny are often interpreted in functional terms and linked to their putative importance for fitness. Across larger time scales, morphological transformations in these complexes are examined through character stability or mutability during cladogenesis. Because the fittest organisms must pass through ontogenetic changes in size and shape, it is predicted that addressing such transformations at different time scales, from life histories to macroevolution, would illuminate major factors contributing to phenotypic diversity. The symposium will feature contemporary questions in integrative and comparative biology and the cutting-edge tools used to study them, hence creating a platform for discussion about the frontiers of functional morphology, evolutionary, and ontogenetic research. The symposium and its products (a minimum of 11 peer-reviewed publications, along with supplementary data, published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology) will contribute to the understanding of the patterns and processes that characterize phenotypic diversity at various scales.