Symposium number: 35

Title: NEUROENDOCRINE CONTROL OF BEHAVIOUR

Principal organizer: Stefan Leitner
School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, United Kingdom
email: leitner@orn.mpg.de

Second organizer: Wolfgang Goymann
Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology, Von-der-Tann Str. 7, D-82346 Andechs, Germany

First keynote speaker: Manfred Gahr
Department of Developmental and Behavioural Neurobiology, Institute of Neuroscience, Faculty of Life Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1087, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Title of first keynote paper: Hormone dependent song pattern generation and perception

Second keynote speaker: Stefan Leitner
School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, United Kingdom
Title of second keynote paper: Neuroendocrine control of song plasticity in songbirds

Contributed talks

Symposium description: Although research on behavioural and evolutionary biology has achieved great success, there is now a need to integrate it with studies on underlying neural and hormonal mechanisms. Towards that end, this symposium will address hormone-mediated modulation of reproductive signals in both songbirds and non-songbirds. One excellent example is vocal behaviour controlled by the song control system in the forebrain via the action of steroid hormones that are affected by environmental factors such as day-length and the availability of food and mating partners. The extent to which environmental and physiological factors influence this system need teasing out. Complex signals should be costly to produce; and as a consequence there are neuronal costs in maintaining any such signals that are essential in a reproductive context. These costs are borne by both the sender (mostly males) and the receiver (mostly females). Exceptions are species in which both sexes sing or in which conventional sex roles are reversed. In this symposium, we aim to compare and describe the effect of these systems in different bird species.

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