Animals and environments: resisting schisms in comparative physiology and biochemistry.

The articles in this volume are a product of the enthusiasm shown by delegates to meet in a remote corner of southern Africa and to discuss comparative physiology and biochemistry in their wider interpretation and future course. This collection reflects a small but long-standing commitment to fostering the engagement of biological research with African issues and colleagues. Comparative physiology and biochemistry are evolving, but in this we must guard against fractionation of effort and purpose. Increasingly available molecular methods are seductive in encouraging work on model species and in employing these species in place of more appropriate comparative models. Concomitantly, the comparative approach is reaching out beyond the individual organism and organism-organism interactions to establish underlying principles at ecosystem and landscape levels. The integration of molecular methods into comparative studies will require judicious selection and use of such skills if it is to be achieved without abandoning nonmodel species. The physiological and metabolic bases of ecosystem and evolutionary approaches must be underpinned by relevant data, requiring comparative researchers to accommodate colleagues contributing this specialist knowledge. These articles report distinct symposia, prefaced by a plenary paper. While each paper is itself a review of an entire symposium, they all exhibit a common theme, that comparative physiology and biochemistry are about interactions. It is our hope that the Comparative Physiology and Biology in Africa meetings will continue to facilitate special interactions between the people who make this happen.