Human life is hard work: getting an education, working, raising children, paying the mortgage, etc. But how hard do free-living animals work during their routine day-to-day activities, such as when breeding, escaping predators, finding food, or choosing a mate? What determines how hard individuals will work on specific activities? Can the term "exercise", perhaps defined as activity for the sake of improving or maintaining performance be applied to these routine behaviors? Is there evidence that free-living animals "train" to improve performance prior to onset of high levels of activity? Can animals work too hard, such that they pay costs of high levels of activity? Until recently, much work on animal movement has been based in the laboratory and has been divorced from ecological context. However, there have been rapid, recent advances in animal tracking technology which are giving biologists an unprecedented ability to track continuously the behavior of individual free-living animals. This will allow researchers to directly address the questions posed above, advancing our understanding of just how hard free-living animals work and why some individuals might work harder than others.
By combining the power of recent technological advances in animal tracking or "bio-logging" (automated radio-tracking arrays, geolocators, GPS, accelerometers), with complex, multivariate behavioral and physiological analysis biologists can address three key themes: a) individual variation in the intensity of movement, behavior or performance in response to challenging ecological scenarios; b) physiological mechanisms underlying this individual variation, and c) fitness consequences of individual variation in work-load of free-living animals. This full-day symposium on The Ecology of Exercise will bring together speakers covering a wide range of animal taxa, and different types of activity, behavior or performance. The topics will address multiple levels of organization, such as immunological response, ontogenetic stages, and kinesiology aspects of performance. The breadth of this symposium is expected to attract a broad audience and a substantial number of submissions for the associated paper and poster presentation sessions, particularly from students who are training in related areas of science. A special issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology will be produced featuring papers from the symposium talks.
