Meeting: The Ecology of Exercise: Mechanisms Underlying Individual Variation in Movement Behavior, Activity, or Performance, New Orleans, LA, January 4-8 2017

人类的生活是艰苦的工作：接受教育、工作、抚养孩子、支付抵押贷款等等。但是，在日常生活中，自由生活的动物在它们的日常活动中，如繁殖、躲避捕食者、寻找食物或选择配偶时，工作有多努力？是什么决定了个人在具体活动上的努力程度？“锻炼”这个术语，可能被定义为为了提高或保持成绩而进行的活动，这一术语能否适用于这些日常行为？是否有证据表明，在高水平活动开始之前，自由生活的动物会进行“训练”以提高表现？动物会不会工作太辛苦，以至于付出高水平活动的代价？直到最近，许多关于动物运动的工作都是在实验室进行的，已经脱离了生态环境。然而，最近在动物跟踪技术方面取得了快速的进步，这给了生物学家前所未有的能力来持续跟踪个体自由生活的动物的行为。这将使研究人员能够直接解决上面提出的问题，促进我们对自由生活的动物工作有多努力，以及为什么有些人可能比其他人更努力工作的理解。通过将动物跟踪或“生物记录”(自动无线电跟踪阵列、地理定位器、GPS、加速计)方面最新技术进步的力量与复杂的、多变量的行为和生理分析相结合，生物学家可以研究三个关键主题：a)针对具有挑战性的生态情景，运动强度、行为或表现的个体差异；b)这种个体差异背后的生理机制；以及c)自由生活动物工作负荷的个体差异的健康后果。这个关于运动生态学的全天研讨会将汇集演讲者，涵盖广泛的动物类群，以及不同类型的活动、行为或表演。这些主题将涉及多个层次的组织，如免疫反应、个体发生阶段和表现的运动学方面。这次研讨会的广度预计将吸引广泛的观众，并为相关的论文和海报演示会议提供大量的意见书，特别是来自正在接受相关科学领域培训的学生。将出版一期《综合与比较生物学》特刊，收录研讨会演讲的论文。

Human life is hard work: getting an education, working, raising children, paying the mortgage, etc. But how hard do free-living animals work during their routine day-to-day activities, such as when breeding, escaping predators, finding food, or choosing a mate? What determines how hard individuals will work on specific activities? Can the term "exercise", perhaps defined as activity for the sake of improving or maintaining performance be applied to these routine behaviors? Is there evidence that free-living animals "train" to improve performance prior to onset of high levels of activity? Can animals work too hard, such that they pay costs of high levels of activity? Until recently, much work on animal movement has been based in the laboratory and has been divorced from ecological context. However, there have been rapid, recent advances in animal tracking technology which are giving biologists an unprecedented ability to track continuously the behavior of individual free-living animals. This will allow researchers to directly address the questions posed above, advancing our understanding of just how hard free-living animals work and why some individuals might work harder than others. By combining the power of recent technological advances in animal tracking or "bio-logging" (automated radio-tracking arrays, geolocators, GPS, accelerometers), with complex, multivariate behavioral and physiological analysis biologists can address three key themes: a) individual variation in the intensity of movement, behavior or performance in response to challenging ecological scenarios; b) physiological mechanisms underlying this individual variation, and c) fitness consequences of individual variation in work-load of free-living animals. This full-day symposium on The Ecology of Exercise will bring together speakers covering a wide range of animal taxa, and different types of activity, behavior or performance. The topics will address multiple levels of organization, such as immunological response, ontogenetic stages, and kinesiology aspects of performance. The breadth of this symposium is expected to attract a broad audience and a substantial number of submissions for the associated paper and poster presentation sessions, particularly from students who are training in related areas of science. A special issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology will be produced featuring papers from the symposium talks.