Role of behavior in meeting osmotic challenges

Abstract

SYNOPSIS. Biologists must remember that physiology is the product of natural selection on organisms interacting with heterogeneous environments. "Behaving" organisms may alter the osnïotic conditions they experience and achieve results unexpected from laboratory studies. Their ability to exploit environmental heterogeneity depends on its temporal/spatial scale relative to that of the organism, and the correspondence between the osmotic differences and the organism's sensory and osmoregulatory physiology. "Behaviors" include evasion of stressful habitats, selection among differing niicroenvironinents, changing body characteristics that affect salt/water uptake/loss, manipulating fluids differing in osmolytes, and modification of osmotic niicroenvironments (especially for vulnerable offspring). To draw "comparative and integrative" inferences, investigators must strive to understand an organism's actual challenges by "seeing" the world from its perspective, and then making observations and performing experiments in the context of the "real world" experienced by that organism.