Meeting: The world is not flat: Accounting for the dynamic nature of the environment as we move beyond static experimental manipulations - January 3-7, 2019, Tampa, FL

North Dakota State University Fargo, Fargo ND

Investigators

Abstract

The world that animals live in is constantly changing, requiring responses to predictable changes in environmental variables such as temperature, food availability or tidal cycles. While physiological responses to environmental variability are widely acknowledged, research is often conducted in a manner that attempts to minimize that variability. It is becoming evident however that to fully understand an organism's interaction with its environment, research approaches are needed that explore how natural variation or experiments conducted under more natural environmental regimes (e.g. daily and annual fluctuations in temperature) affects physiological mechanisms and responses to this variation. Recently, a number of investigators have turned their focus towards attempting to incorporate environmental variation into studies of physiology and behavior. Not surprisingly these studies are finding that the results from studies that include environmental variation differ substantially from those that do not. The goal of this symposium is to highlight important insights that are gained when studies take into account these, often dramatic, changes and to stimulate future research that is needed to better understand how animals, including many economically important species, may cope with changing environments. The symposium is designed to bring together researchers working across taxa and ecosystems. This symposium will include a diverse range of researchers that span career stages from graduate student to full professor, and all speakers will disseminate these findings in a special issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology. Nearly all animals experience dramatic, often predictable, changes in their environment that requires responsive changes in an individual's physiology and behavior. Yet many studies aimed at understanding evolutionary and ecological responses to an environmental or physiological variable of interest seek to control and minimize variation. Some examples include the incubation of eggs in species with environmental sex determination under continuous temperatures through the duration of incubation, or hormone implants aimed at maintaining relatively constant circulating levels for an extended period of time. Whether conducted in the laboratory or the field, these studies have provided critical information about the mechanistic relationships that influence physiology and behavior that, in turn, influence variation in individual fitness, despite providing limited information on the direct effects of environmental variation. Understanding why and how animals cope with environmental changes is key to recognizing the sources and subsequent responses that give rise to the variation that selection can act upon. This symposium draws on longstanding questions in comparative physiology (e.g., how do animals cope with environmental variability?), but approaches those questions from a modern perspective. The group of speakers represent a diverse group of scientists. In addition to the main symposium, a contributed session will be advertised that will specifically target student trainees, and efforts will be made to reach out to underrepresented groups through announcements in organizations such as the Society for Advancing Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.