Meeting: Integrative Life-History of Whole-Organism Performance; A Symposium for the Annual SICB Meeting in New Orleans, LA, January 4-8 2017

Society For Integrative And Comparative Biology, Herndon VA

Investigators

Abstract

When organisms use energy for one purpose they must sacrifice the use of that energy for something else. While many investigators have examined how animals trade energy that could be used for something, such as the immune system, for reproduction, very few have considered how athletic performance fits into the picture. Performance is clearly important for survival and requires high amounts of energy, so to better understand how and why animals invest energy in what they do, it is necessary to understand the place of performance in these decisions. The PIs have organized a symposium to bring together speakers from diverse backgrounds, career stages, and institutions from across the biological sciences to the 2017 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in New Orleans to discuss these very fundamental questions. This funding will provide travel and subsistence costs to facilitate discussion and dissemination of ideas generated. The content of the primary symposium will be disseminated through publication of 11 peer-reviewed publications in the SICB journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. In addition to the technical communication of the symposium, they will use several online blogs and Twitter to engage non-scientists. They have developed a social networking event and "Complementary Sessions" of talks and posters targeted for junior scientists (post-doctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates) to provide these beginning investigators with an opportunity to interact with and receive feedback from experts in the field. Life-history theory attempts to explain how disparate yet related characteristics of organisms are shaped by selection to achieve reproductive success. Central to this idea is the notion that investment of acquired energetic resources in a particular trait denies those same resources being allocated to a different trait. This constraint constitutes the proximate basis for life-history trade-offs, of which perhaps the best studied is the survival-fecundity trade-off. Although life-history theory has been extremely useful in elucidating how resource allocation can result in adaptive responses to the environment, it is still unclear which traits that enhance survival are subject to trade-offs and how life-history regulatory mechanisms interact. Whole-organism performance traits constitute key links between animals and their environments, and has been codified as the central component of the ecomorphological paradigm. Despite the success of ecomorphology as an integrative framework, the study of performance has traditionally been conducted independent of life-history theory. Whole-organism performance traits, such as locomotor capacity, are typically energetically expensive, and as such performance traits are themselves life-history traits. However, performance is seldom integrated into life-history studies in a way that examines trade-offs among performance and other fitness-related traits. This symposium includes researchers with expertise in the fields of life-history theory, functional morphology, ecoimmunology, endocrinology, evolution, ecology, behavior, and genomics to develop a framework for understanding how whole-organism performance can be mechanistically linked to traditional life-history traits. Such a framework will significantly advance the fields of life-history theory and animal performance.