Meeting Abstract
Many behaviours crucial for survival and reproductive success, including migration, foraging, and escaping from predators, involve elevated levels of activity or “workload”. It seems intuitive that individuals with higher “capacity” for, or tolerance of the costs of, activity or workload will have higher fitness but does increased physical activity (exercise) enhance athletic capacity in free-living animals? Although there has been considerable interest in the physiological mechanisms that underpin individual variation in exercise performance, to date, much work on the physiology of exercise has been conducted using captive animals in laboratory settings that are often quite removed from the animal’s ecology. We will review current, laboratory-based, model systems for exercise to address the question of whether these can inform us about common physiological markers of elevated levels of activity, or the physiological costs of high workload, that might provide relevant ‘targets’ for mechanistic analysis of routine activities in free-living animals. We will also discuss particular caveats for interpretation of results from laboratory-based systems. Specifically, we will consider a) how physiological responses might be influenced by the nature of exercise, b) resource acquisition and food availability, in the context of routine activities in free-living animals, and c) effects of high workload associated with lab systems of exercise on proxies of fitness such as reproduction. We will conclude by considering whether we need to develop new, more ecologically-realistic models of exercise in the laboratory and we will describe preliminary results on physiological responses to ‘training’ and ‘exercise’ in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) where we have experimentally manipulated foraging effort.
