Dear list members, (apologies for cross-posting) we are pleased to announce and invite you to participate in the following symposium, to be held as part of the XXVI International Bioacoustics Council Meeting (Haridwar, India, 8-13 October 2017): “Does size matter? Allometric principles in animal acoustic signals” Organizers: Dr. Livio Favaro, Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Italy (livio.favaro@unito.it); Dr. Maxime Garcia, ENESLab/NEURO-PSI, CNRS UMR 9197, Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne (maxime.garcia@ymail.com); Dr. Andrea Ravignani, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Sealcentre Pieterburen, AI-Lab, VrijeUniversiteit Brussel (andrea.ravignani@gmail.com) To express your interest in participating and submitting an abstract, please send an e-mail with the title of your contribution to the organizers before April, 26th. Symposium description: Animal vocalisations can encode a variety of information, including physical features of the signaler. In particular, acoustic allometry investigates how vocal features scale with body dimensions of an animal. Intuitively, larger animals may have larger vocal organs, hence sounding bigger, within or across species. The study of acoustic allometry is a crucial step to verify this assumption and identify outliers to this expectation. Ultimately, it allows to better understand sound production and evolutionary history of specific vocalisations or acoustic features. Over the last decades, the study of allometry has flourished. However, although the relationship between body size and acoustic features of vocalisations has been documented in many mammals, it deserves further investigations across other taxa. A purpose of our symposium is to connect and summarise findings of allometry across multiple dimensions and perspectives. First, we will focus on comparison across species, with contributions potentially focusing on any animal, as long as this relates to allometry. Second, we will examine the link between producing and perceiving sounds that contain acoustic allometric features, both within and between species. Third, we hope to attract research work documenting an absence of acoustic allometry to ask which socio-ecological and evolutionary factors may lead a species to deviate from a widespread allometric pattern. Fourth, inspired by Tinbergen’s approach, we aim to present contributions dealing with allometry from a functional, mechanistic, developmental and phylogenetic perspective. Indeed, allometric mechanisms are different depending on the taxa considered (e.g. while some birds show tracheal elongation, some mammals have laryngeal or vocal tract hypertrophy). Moreover, the evolutionary bases for acoustic allometric rules are diverse (e.g. sexual selection, agonistic interaction, species-specific recognition) and interconnected with other questions such as encoding of species, population or individual identity information in vocalisations. Fifth, we will explore new approaches and directions to allometry, such as its connection to vocal learning, size exaggeration, and human non-linguistic vocalisations. Finally, we will focus on potentially promising applications of this research strand, including livestock and conservation, with the objective to make use of estimating the size of an individual towards minimized disturbance. For more info on the conference, abstract submission and deadline, please visit: www.ibac2017india.com We look forward to seeing you in Haridwar. Best wishes, Livio Favaro -- Livio Favaro, PhD Università degli Studi di Torino Dip. Scienze della Vita e Biologia dei Sistemi Laboratorio di Zoologia e Biologia Marina Via Accademia Albertina, 13 - 10123 Torino Tel. +39.011.6704538 / 78 Fax +39.011.6704508 e-mail livio.favaro@unito.it