Bridging the gap between eco-immunology and disease ecology: Symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah, January 3-7, 2011

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This symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology will bring together prominent researchers working in the areas of eco-immunology and disease ecology and to provide a forum to review research in their respective subfields. It will foster collaborations across fields through the discussion of philosophical and empirical research approaches, and generate ideas on how to best utilize current technologies to address the common questions. Disease resistance is a function of pathogen dynamics including prevalence and virulence (disease ecology), but is also driven by the internal physiological state of an individual, including host immune function (eco-immunology). Despite the interconnectedness between the two disciplines the majority of research has focused on only one level of analysis, either ultimate (evolution and ecology of parasites and their effects on life histories) or a proximate (how environmental variables affect immune responses). However, the effects of ecological and evolutionary factors on susceptibility to disease are driven not only by environmental variation in diseases and their vectors but also by differences in host immune function that alters disease susceptibility across individuals. The goal of the symposium is to critically review recent advances in the disciplines of eco-immunology and disease ecology, and to integrate both the proximate and ultimate perspectives into a common theoretical framework.