Symposium on Maternal Effects as Adaptations, St. Louis, Missouri

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9622552 Mousseau The first symposium on Maternal Effects as Adaptations will be held during the 1996 Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) meetings at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, June 19-23, 1996. Approximately 20 invited participants will present recent and current results concerning the evolution of maternal effects in natural populations during the symposium, contributed paper session, and roundtable discussion. Funds from NSF will be used to provide partial support for travel costs of invited speakers and for a partial graduate student stipend to help with editorial chores associated with a proceedings volume to be published by Oxford University Press in 1997. Participants were chosen to provide a broad coverage of this nascent field; topics include theoretical considerations, quantitative genetic estimation, and the importance of maternal effects to the evolution of life histories, behavior, and population dynamics in a wide variety of plants and animals. Although largely ignored in the past, maternal effects are receiving growing attention by evolutionary biologists as a direct consequence of the realization that maternal effects are very commonly observed in nature, and may often represent a form of "trans-generational phenotypic plasticity." The incorporation of quantitative genetic designs in many evolutionary studies has permitted the decomposition of phenotypic variation into components due to genotype, environment and parental environmental influences. When sought, maternal effects are frequently observed. For example, maternal effects, many of which appear to serve an adaptive function, have been reported in plants, birds, lizards, insects, amphibians, fish, and mammals. The objective of this symposium is to assemble a group of prominent biologists to unify conceptual and empirical advances concerning maternal effects in nature. It is believed that such a gathering can at once synthesize the current state of knowledge and identify particular areas for fu ture investigation.