Symposium: Frontiers in the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior: Nothing in Neuroscience Makes Sense Except in the Light of Behavior

How animals interact with each other and their environment has eternally fascinated scientists and non-scientists. Unfortunately, when studies are limited to a single process or targeted approach, they often fail to holistically explain the beauty and complexity of animal behavior in natural ecological systems. As the 50^th anniversary of Tinbergen’s seminal publication (Tinbergen, 1963) on levels of analysis in studies of animal behavior has come and gone, efforts to integrate neural, genetic, physiological, ecological, and evolutionary studies of behavior at the organismal level are gaining new prominence. Specifically, with the development of new resources and tools in genomics, physiology, neurobiology, and behavioral tracking, it is now becoming possible to integrate across levels of biological organization as well as across taxa and spatiotemporal scales. Such an “integrative study of animal behavior” has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the proximate and ultimate mechanisms underlying behavior and how evolution shapes these processes. This symposium will showcase research that not only incorporates multiple axes (i.e. levels of analysis) into a single project, but further, that which produces results that are mutually-informative among these areas such that the advances generated along one axis can change the interpretation along other axes, leading to conceptual leaps that can inform the field of animal behavior as a whole.

Sponsors: DAB, DCE, DEE & DNB
Symposium supported through NSF-IOS 1439985 “New frontiers for the integrative study of animal behavior” and the NSF Sociogenomics Research Coordination Network.

Organizers

• Suzy Renn, Associate Professor, Reed College
• Hans Hofmann, Professor, U.T. Austin
• Dustin Rubenstein, Associate Professor, Columbia Univ

Speakers

S12.1 Thursday, Jan. 7, 08:30 RUEBNSTEIN, Dustin R.:

Animal behavior: past, present and future

S12.2 Thursday, Jan. 7, 09:00 AKCAY, Erol:

Modeling the co-evolution of social structure and behaviors in animal societies

S12.3 Thursday, Jan. 7, 09:30 CHOW, B.Y.:

New tools to engineer cellular circuitry in behavioral neuroscience

S12.4 Thursday, Jan. 7, 10:30 GROZINGER, Christina:

Cooperation and conflict in social insect societies: from genes to pheromones

S12.5 Thursday, Jan. 7, 11:00 WOOLLEY, S M:

Insights gained from comparative approaches to studying vocal communication

S12.6 Thursday, Jan. 7, 11:30 KINGSBURY, M.A.:

Social variation across sexes, individuals, species and seasons: The role of vasoactive intestinal polypeptide in avian affiliative behavior

S12.7 Thursday, Jan. 7, 13:30 MCGRAW, K.J.*; WEAVER, M; HUTTON, P; GIRAUDEAU, M; COOK, M:

Urban impacts on avian life-history variation: integrative approaches to studying sex, stress, sleep, signaling, and sickness in the city

S12.8 Thursday, Jan. 7, 14:00 RENN, SCP*; O’ROURKE, C; RENN, Susan:

Integrating Metabolic Regulation and Maternal Care in an African Cichlid fish.

S12.9 Thursday, Jan. 7, 14:30 MARTIN, LB*; BARRON, DG; BURKETT-CADENA, ND; BURGAN, SB; GERVASI, SS; UYSAL, AK; SHIMIZU, T:

Individual variation and covariation in vector-borne disease directed behaviors