SICB Symposium: The Coevolution of Frugivorous Animals with the Natural Occurrence of Ethanol in Fermenting Fruit, January 5-9, 2004

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This symposium brings together speakers from diverse backgrounds to address the natural occurrence of ethanol within ripe and fermenting fruit, together with the concomitantly evolved physiological and behavioral responses to ethanol in diverse frugivorous taxa. Until recently, animal exposure to ethanol in taxa other than humans and Drosophila has been largely viewed as incidental. The ubiquity of yeasts and fermentative processes within sugar-rich fruit, however, suggests that low-level ethanol exposure via dietary ingestion has historically characterized all frugivorous animal taxa. Development of this novel evolutionary perspective has been paralleled by renewed interest in the use of Drosophila mutants to identify those molecular pathways underlying inebriation and addiction. This symposium will address natural patterns of ethanol exposure in a variety of non-human metazoan taxa, including those yeasts that engage in fermentation, ripe fruits within which are found both yeasts and sugars, insect taxa that metabolize and benefit from low-level ethanol concentrations, and frugivorous primates and other vertebrate taxa that depend on ripe fruits as their primary nutritional resource. This program is thus fully interdisciplinary and integrative, uniting otherwise seemingly unrelated themes such as yeast biology, fruit ripening, primate ancestry, and genetic variation in Drosophila. This symposium will provide the relevant ecological and evolutionary backgrounds to these diverse phenomena, and will illustrate broadly the comparative physiological and behavioral aspects of exposure to naturally occurring ethanol in diverse non-human taxa. This symposium is very appropriate for the membership of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, which now emphasizes broader and evolutionary perspectives on diverse biological phenomena. Although not a theme of this symposium, study of the comparative biology of ethanol ingestion may be of relevance to evolutionary interpretations of ethanol consumption by humans. Also, annual meetings of this society are well-attended by graduate students and postdocs who will have the opportunity to hear and interact with those working in this emerging field of comparative biology.