NSF Award
2235558
This award supports travel for participants in a symposium, Daily torpor across birds and mammals: Recent progress and how do we advance the field?, at the January 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). Animals that experience unpredictable or energy-scarce conditions have evolved a variety of strategies to survive them. One such strategy is the use of torpor, by which animals lower their metabolic rates, heart rates, and/or body temperatures to minimize energy expenditure. The symposium focuses on recent research on daily torpor in birds and mammals, an area that has advanced quickly and expanded rapidly across animal taxa in the past decade. It will include research on the genetic mechanisms underlying daily torpor, and the main unanswered questions in the field will be summarized. The eleven invited symposium speakers represent a range of career stages, including a majority of early-career scientists, and use many different approaches to study torpor in birds and mammals globally (from tenrecs and primates to hummingbirds and bats, in Africa, North and South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia). Currently, there is very little consensus on common metrics that can be used to measure torpor across taxa, and a goal of the symposium is to develop useful metrics to advance the field. The symposium’s overall goal is to share recent knowledge and foster a discussion on future research on daily torpor across vertebrate taxa. Results from the symposium will be disseminated by publication in the SICB journal, Integrative and Comparative Biology.<br/><br/>Daily torpor is a growing research field, due in part to technological advancements (e.g., increasingly portable respirometry, higher-resolution thermal cameras, smaller and more advanced physiological dataloggers) and expanded taxonomic scope. As a result, many researchers the world over have developed their own approaches to measure and describe the use of daily torpor in a range of species, but there has been little cross-talk between people who study mammal torpor and those who study bird torpor. The goal of the symposium is for early-career researchers to come together with more established researchers to discuss recent advances and approaches in the field and to discuss the gaps in knowledge to be addressed in future work. The speakers will present their research, followed by a round-table discussion involving the speakers and the audience. Future directions that the symposium will address include the use of genomic and transcriptomic data to understand the genetic mechanisms underlying the evolution of torpor. Some of the broader impacts of studying torpor will also be addressed, including the potential impact on medical science, including induced hypothermia for safer surgeries and safe organ transplant by induced cooling, as well as developing induced hibernation for potential space travel. The symposium speakers will contribute papers for a special issue of the SICB journal, Integrative and Comparative Biology, which will include a future-oriented paper about unifying principles and future directions in the field based on the discussion at the end of symposium.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
