Meeting: SICB 2014 parasitic manipulation symposium, Austin, Texas, 3-7 January 2014

该奖项支持研讨会“寄生虫操纵宿主表型，或如何使僵尸”，将于2014年1月3日至7日在德克萨斯州奥斯汀举行的综合和比较生物学年会上举行。寄生虫是地球上最流行的生活方式，以至于几乎所有的动物都被寄生虫感染。许多寄生虫以帮助寄生虫的方式改变它们所生活的动物的行为。例如，一种真菌使它感染的蚂蚁离开蚁群，爬到一片叶子上，把它的下巴夹在叶子上，并呆在那里，直到蚂蚁死在真菌传播孢子的正确位置。这种控制宿主的能力远远超过了生物学家所能达到的任何水平，因此寄生虫可能会教会我们很多关于如何改变行为的知识。本次研讨会将汇集来自世界各地的12位科学家进行演讲，目的是了解寄生虫如何改变其宿主的行为，以及这些行为变化的后果可能是什么。研讨会将有助于从寄生虫学领域以外的专业知识（包括行为生态学家，免疫学家，神经生物学家，生态学家，无脊椎动物生物学家，脊椎动物生物学家和进化生物学家），以提供更完整的图片寄生虫如何操纵他们的主机。计划举办一个关于寄生虫识别的补充讲习班（面向学生）和专题讨论会的海报会议，让其他人介绍相关的研究结果。研讨会的论文将发表在《综合与比较生物学》杂志上。寄生虫操纵经常出现在大众媒体上，科学记者有兴趣报道这一事件。

This award supports the symposium "Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie", to be held at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference on 3-7 January 2014, in Austin, Texas. Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on the planet, so much so that nearly all animals are infected by parasites. Many parasites change the behaviors of the animals in which they live in ways that help the parasites. For example, one species of fungus makes ants it infects leave the ant colony, climb up to a leaf, clamp its jaws on a leaf, and stay there until the ant dies in just the right place for the fungus to spread its spores. This sort of ability to control a host far surpasses anything biologists have been able to achieve, so parasites may have much to teach us about how to change behaviors. This symposium will bring together twelve scientists from around the world to give presentations, with the goal of understanding how parasites can change the behavior of their hosts, and what the consequences of those behavioral changes might be. The symposium will help bring in expertise from outside of the field of parasitology (including behavioral ecologists, immunologists, neurobiologists, ecologists, invertebrate biologists, vertebrate biologists, and evolutionary biologists) to provide a more complete picture of how parasites manipulate their hosts. There are plans for a complementary workshop on parasite identification (geared towards students) and a poster session to the symposium, allowing others to present related findings. Papers from the symposium will be published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. Parasite manipulation is routinely featured in popular press, and science journalists are interested in covering this event.