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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press ABSTRACTMany animal populations are in decline as a result of human activity. Conservation practitioners are attempting to prevent further declines and loss of biodiversity as well as to facilitate recovery of endangered species, and they often rely on interdisciplinary approaches to generate conservation solutions. Two recent interfaces in conservation science involve animal behavior (i.e., conservation behavior) and physiology (i.e., conservation physiology). To date, these interfaces have been considered separate entities, but from both pragmatic and biological perspectives, there is merit in better integrating behavior and physiology to address applied conservation problems and to inform resource management. Although there are some institutional, conceptual, methodological, and communication-oriented challenges to integrating behavior and physiology to inform conservation actions, most of these barriers can be overcome. Through outlining several successful examples that integrate these disciplines, we conclude that physiology and behavior can together generate meaningful data to support animal conservation and management actions. Tangentially, applied conservation and management problems can, in turn, also help advance and reinvigorate the fundamental disciplines of animal physiology and behavior by providing advanced natural experiments that challenge traditional frameworks.

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Iridescent colors in feathers are some of the brightest in nature, and are produced by coherent light scattering from periodic arrangements of melanosomes (melanin-containing organelles). Hollow melanosomes, an evolutionary innovation largely restricted to birds, contain an optically powerful combination of high and low refractive indices (from the melanin and air, respectively) that enables production of brighter and more saturated colors than solid melanosomes. However, despite their significance to avian color and potential utility as optical biomaterials, little is known about the ontogeny of either the melanosomes themselves or the nanostructures they comprise. We used light and electron microscopy to characterize nanostructural development in regenerating feathers of wild turkeys, a species with iridescent color produced by a hexagonally close-packed array of hollow melanosomes. We found that melanosomes form as solid bodies in melanocytes. Later in development, largely after placement in developing barbules, their interiors dissolve and leave hollow cores. These now hollow melanosomes are initially disorganized in the barbule, but become close-packed as they are pulled to the edge of the barbule, likely through a combination of forces including depletion-attraction. These data suggest that these structurally colored tissues are self-assembled and represent novel pathways of development.

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