Symposium: Environmentally Cued Hatching Across Taxa: Embryos Choose a Birthday

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Karen L. Martin, Karen M. Warkentin and Richard R. StrathmannIOS-1036933Environmentally Cued Hatching Across Taxa: Embryos Choose a BirthdayMany animals alter their hatching timing in response to environmental cues to risks and opportunities that affect eggs and hatched young. These include diverse invertebrates (from parasitic flatworms to lobsters) and vertebrates (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and birds). The widespread, common phenomenon of environmentally cued hatching has been studied largely as a series of isolated cases, limiting our understanding of both its diversity and its shared characteristics. An integrative and comparative approach to environmentally cued hatching will improve our understanding of animal reproduction and early life stages. The project is a one-day symposium focused on embryos as organisms that are subject to natural selection and responsive to their environment, and hatching as an ecologically critical transition point. The symposium will be held at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meetings, in Salt Lake City, Utah, on January 6, 2011, and the proceedings published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. The symposium will bring together ten scientists studying hatching timing in animals that respond to a wide variety of environmental conditions, risks, and resources. Associated sessions of contributed posters and talks will expand the range of participants and facilitate interactions between students and established scientists. Speakers will address the ecological context of environmentally cued hatching, the developmental and physiological mechanisms that allow embryos to hatch or to remain in the egg over a range of ages and developmental stages, and the mechanisms connecting environmental cues to the hatching process, including relative roles of embryos and parents. The symposium will build a unified conceptual framework for research on environmentally cued hatching and foster an integrated understanding of both the diversity and commonalities of embryo responses to their environment. It will improve our understanding of the evolution, ecological roles, and mechanisms of hatching plasticity in particular and embryo behavior more generally.