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

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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.