Meeting Abstract

S5-1   08:30 - 09:00  The lesser-known transitions: how animals navigate abiotic changes in their surrounding media Easterling, CM*; Kolmann, MA; O’Donnell, MK; Northwest University, Science Department, Kirkland, WA; University of Michigan, Museum of Paleontology, Ann Arbor, MI; Lycoming College, Biology Department, Williamsport, PA charly.easterling@gmail.com https://easterlingc.wixsite.com/easterlingc

From minute-to-minute changes, or across daily, seasonal, or geological-level timescales, animals are forced to navigate dynamic surroundings. These changes could include alterations of the substrates animals locomote on, flow dynamics of the microhabitats they feed in, or even altitudinal shifts over migration routes. The only constancy in any organisms’ day-to-day existence is the heterogeneity of the habitats they move through and the gradients in the physical media (e.g., air, water) they live in. We aim to explore a broad range of organismal transitions across abiotic gradients and investigate how these organisms modify their form, function, and behavior to accommodate their surrounding media. We ask the following questions: (1) What are some challenges common to animals in changing media or moving between media? (2) What are common solutions to these recurring problems? (3) How often are these common solutions instances of either convergence or parallelism? Through discussions and critical analysis of numerous datasets spanning multiple taxa, timescales, and levels of analysis we suggest that: (A) the roles of physical principles (e.g., drag, gravity, buoyancy, viscosity) in constraining morphology and shaping the realized niche have been underappreciated, (B) investigations of these transitions and the adaptations related to them should include comparisons at multiple levels of biological organization and timescale, (C) relatedly, studies of organisms that undergo habitat and substrate changes over ontogeny would be worthwhile to include in comparisons, and finally, (D) researchers should complement lab-based morphological and kinematic studies with observational and experimental approaches in the field.