Conference: Energetics, selection for mating, and ecological innovation

This award supports participants in a symposium and related activities that will be held during the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). The symposium’s focus is on energetics, selection of conspicuous traits involved in mating for males or females of a given species, and ecological innovation. It will bring together researchers from across the country with diverse research expertise in a day-long series of 30-minute oral presentations, a complementary session of 15-minute oral presentations, and a complementary poster session.

Traits and behaviors associated with reproduction are some of the most extreme in nature, including elaborate structures such as the tail of a peacock and displays such as the mating chorus of frogs and many insects. Much work has centered on measuring and describing these characteristics, but they require an enormous amount of energy to grow and maintain.

The symposium brings together ecologists, evolutionary biologists, physiologists, behavioral biologists, and others to examine how processes ranging from mitochondrial metabolism to whole-organism physiology give rise to these characters and their variation. The two major objectives of the symposium are to develop an integrative perspective and synthesis of the energetic processes shaping the evolution of these traits and behaviors, and to highlight the work of early career researchers by fostering networks across sub-fields and promoting interdisciplinary collaborations.

The symposium will focus on the groundbreaking work of early career researchers, including technological innovations in energetics, while also drawing on the historical and foundational knowledge of senior speakers.

Selection for traits that increase success in reproduction drives the evolution of a broad diversity of traits from the enlarged claws of male fiddler crabs that can account for 50% of body mass, the high-energy behavioral displays of hummingbirds, the wing ‘snapping’ displays of manakins to the calling of frogs. Most work to understand the process of selection of such characteristics has aimed to measure the magnitude of these signals.

Yet, we know little about how different organisms use energy to fuel phenotypes shaped by such selection mechanisms. The energetic properties of these signals are ultimately fueled by metabolic machinery at multiple organizational scales, from mitochondrial properties and enzymatic activity to the modification of muscular and neural tissues. However, different organisms have different underlying physiology and face different ecological selection pressures, and thus often have adaptations at multiple scales that shape such selected traits and behavior.

These physiological adaptations likely feed back into life-history functions and may lay a foundation for ecological innovation. This symposium will feature contributions from a range of research areas that cross organizational scales and focus on non-model organismal systems, so that researchers have the opportunity to exchange ideas and synthesize concepts.

The symposium will highlight multiple axes of diversity, including speakers from different career stages, genders, and research foci. Participants will have the opportunity to synthesize the current state of the field and identify areas for future growth to produce a synthetic paper to accompany publications of the individual symposium presentations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.