SCIB Symposium: EcoPhysiology and Conservation: The contribution of Endocrinology and Immunology, January 4-9, 2004

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Award AbstractThe symposium entitled: "EcoPhysiology and Conservation: The Contribution of Endocrinology and Immunology" sponsored by the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, examines the contributions that ecophysiologists are making to conservation biology. This symposium will focus on overviews of endocrinology and immunology with a special emphasis on endocrine disruptors in marine, aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates, which are important to environmental monitoring. New perspectives from the symposium will aid biologists in identifying stressed individuals, reproduction problems, source and sink populations, carrying capacity of specific sites, and landscape features that promote the survival of populations and new metrics to quantify ecosystem health. These perspectives will provide a mechanistic linkage across multiples levels of biological organization, centering on the individual organism. Resulting publications and a website from this symposium will launch a new direction in organismal physiology called Conservation Physiology. This field will draw attention to the role that physiologists can play in conservation biology, spur conservation biologists to revise their text books to incorporate physiological perspectives, encourage ecophysiologists to undertake conservation problems, and will also provide fresh examples and materials for undergraduate and graduate teaching. The combination of physiology and conservation biology in the new field of Conservation Physiology will have broad impacts on the fields of integrative and organismal biology.