Conservation physiology (CP) and nutritional ecology (NE) are both integrative sciences that share the fundamental aim of understanding the patterns, mechanisms and consequences of animal responses to changing environments. Here, we explore the high-level similarities and differences between CP and NE, identifying as central themes to both fields the multiple timescales over which animals adapt (and fail to adapt) to their environments, and the need for integrative models to study these processes. At one extreme are the short-term regulatory responses that modulate the state of animals in relation to the environment, which are variously considered under the concepts of homeostasis, homeorhesis, enantiostasis, heterostasis and allostasis. In the longer term are developmental responses, including phenotypic plasticity and transgenerational effects mediated by non-genomic influences such as parental physiology, epigenetic effects and cultural learning. Over a longer timescale still are the cumulative genetic changes that take place in Darwinian evolution. We present examples showing how the adaptive responses of animals across these timescales have been represented in an integrative framework from NE, the geometric framework (GF) for nutrition, and close with an illustration of how GF can be applied to the central issue in CP, animal conservation.

No abstract

Farewell Spit gannetry in New Zealand. Our results showed intra-and inter-specific variation in the protein, lipid and water composition of prey captured by our sample of 111 Australasian gannets. In addition, we observed significant differences in the Australasian gannets' nutritional niche between seasons. We provide evidence of sex-specific macronutrient foraging strategies in a successful marine predator in the wild. We have shown that in spite of fluctuations in the nutritional composition of foods available to Australasian gannets, males consistently capture prey with higher protein-to-lipid ratios and lower lipid-to-water ratios than females. These results aid to better understand the evolutionary relationship between macronutrient selection and sex-specific traits in wild animals. They also suggest an incentive for these predators to combine individually imbalanced but nutritionally complementary foods to achieve dietary balance, further highlighting the likelihood that prey selection is guided by the balance of macronutrients, rather than energy alone.

Research has shown that if a mother experiences a transitory perturbation to her environment during pregnancy or lactation, there are transgenerational consequences often involving a disordered metabolic phenotype in first generation offspring with recovery across subsequent generations. In contrast, little is known about the nature of the transgenerational response of offspring when a mother experiences a perturbation that is not transitory but instead persists across generations. Our study, using a rat model, subjected the parental generation to a change in environment and concomitant shift from a grain-based to obesogenic diets to generate an adipose phenotype in first generation offspring emulating a common scenario in human urbanisation and migration. We then investigated whether the obese phenotype was stable across generations when maintained in the transitioned environment, and whether dietary macronutrient balance affected the response. We found that second and third generation offspring had a reduced body fat to lean mass ratio and a reduced appetite relative to first generation offspring, irrespective of dietary macronutrient balance. The trajectory of this response is suggestive of a reduction in chronic disease risk across generations. This is one of the first studies, to our knowledge, to investigate the transgenerational response following parental transition to a persistent obesogenic environment, and to demonstrate that successive generations respond differently to this constant environment.