Convenor: Shaun Killen (University of Glasgow)

The aim of the ecophysiology interest group is to promote interactions between scientists who are interested in, or study, the physiology of individual animals in an ecological context, with an emphasis on the implications of that physiology for ecological processes – such as survival, fecundity and geographical distributions. This includes several key areas of research:

  • The physiological processes that are involved in life history trade-offs. In particular the roles that may be played by metabolism and oxidative stress in trade-offs associated with survival, fecundity, growth and senescence throughout ontogeny.

  • The factors that influence energy demands of free-living animals and how these relate to foraging, predator-avoidance, social interactions and reproductive investment, and affect wider aspects of biology including population ecology, spatial ecology and geographical distributions.

  • The use of modern omics technologies in non-standard organisms to understand physiology in settings outside the laboratory.

Ecophysiologists take the view that physiology is a factor that cannot be ignored when attempting to understand the ecology of organisms. A key aim of the group is to bring together ecologists and physiologists who have an interest in using physiology as a tool to understand ecology.