Symposium on Ecological Developmental Biology; January 6 - 10, 2002, Anaheim, California

0091725Gilbert综合与比较生物学学会发育与细胞生物学分部和进化发育生物学分部将召开生态发育生物学研讨会：发育生物学与现实世界的相遇。研讨会将于2002年1月6日至10日在加州阿纳海姆举行的该学会年会期间举行。本次研讨会的目的是唤起人们对发育生物学的一个重要领域的兴趣，这个领域直到最近才被发育生物学家所忽视：生态发育生物学。这一领域包括幼虫生态学、环境性别决定、捕食者诱导的多表型、饮食多表型、社会昆虫种姓决定、卵生态学、表型可塑性的近似原因和致畸等不同领域。发育生物学和生态学交叉领域的研究之所以重要，有几个原因。首先，保护生物学需要了解胚胎和幼虫阶段的生存和发育，就像了解成虫阶段一样。（有研究表明，海龟保护生物学项目一直在只产生一种性别的后代的温度下孵化胚胎，这一点得到了非常明确的说明。）第二，我们认为无害的环境化学物质（至少对成年人无害）可能对生物体的发育阶段有害，并可能威胁到成年人的生育能力。第三，发育生物学的学科以模型系统为中心，这些模型系统被选择为独立于环境条件的系统。这支持了发育的遗传方法，并培养了一种思想，即所有的发育都是由卵子内部（甚至是细胞核内部）调节的。生态发育生物学的研究表明，环境对特定表型的产生是多么重要。第四，我们认为在进化发育生物学这一新兴领域中，生态成分是必要的。如果说第一届SICB进化发育生物学研讨会关注的是“进化-发展”的系统发育、非适应和宏观进化问题，那么这次研讨会将重点关注进化发育生物学的生态、适应和微观进化问题。

0091725Gilbert The Division of Developmental and Cell Biology and the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology will convene a Symposium on Ecological Developmental Biology: Developmental Biology Meets the Real World. The symposium would be conducted during the annual meeting of that society on January 6-10, 2002, in Anaheim, California. The goal of this symposium is to resurrect interest in an important area of developmental biology that has been ignored by developmental biologists until very recently: ecological developmental biology. This field includes such diverse areas as larval ecology, environmental sex determination, predator-induced polyphenisms, dietary polyphenisms, social insect caste determination, egg ecology, proximate causation for phenotypic plasticity, and teratogenesis. The work in the intersection of developmental biology and ecology is important for several reasons. First, conservation biology needs to know about the survival and development of the embryonic and larval stages of development as much as it does about the adult stage. (This point was made very clear when it was shown that turtle conservation biology programs had been incubating embryos at temperatures that only produced only one sex of offspring). Second, environmental chemicals which we had been thought harmless (at least to adults) may be dangerous to the developmental stages of organisms and may threaten the fertility of adults. Third, the discipline of developmental biology has centered around model systems that had been selected for their independence from environmental conditions. This has supported the genetic approach to development and has fostered the thinking that all development is regulated from inside the egg (or even from inside the nucleus). The studies of ecological developmental biology show how important the environment is to the production of particular phenotypes. Fourth, we think that in the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology, the ecological component is necessary. If the first SICB symposium on evolutionary developmental biology focused on the phylogenetic, non-adaptive and macroevolutionary questions of "evo-devo," then this symposium would highlight the ecological, adaptive, and microevolutionary issues of evolutionary developmental biology.