Although excluded from the terrestrial environment, fishes show a remarkable capacity to adapt to aquatic environments, occupying oceans, lakes, rivers, streams and even temporary pools. They can survive water at temperatures ranging from below 0°C to above 40°C, an altitudinal range from the abyssal depths of the oceans to high mountain plateaus, and salinity ranges from close to distilled water to hypersaline waters. Parallel to this adaptation to an extensive range of habitats, fish also show a striking radiation in modes of feeding, life history, reproduction and behaviour. The aquatic ecosystems that fish inhabit are also often subject to highly dynamic changes, over diurnal, tidal and seasonal cycles, and fish exhibit remarkable plasticity to allow them to prosper in the face of such changes.
However, aquatic environments across the globe, and the fish that live in them, are subject to myriad threats, including the input of anthropogenic pollutants, overexploitation, species introductions, physical barriers to movement, the manipulation of flow regimes and global climate change. Fish are responding to these perturbations at all organisational levels, with consequences for gene expression, physiology and patterns of behaviour, and the impact of these changes on populations, communities and ecosystem processes is now beginning to be revealed.
The symposium will explore the ways in which fish are able to occupy such a broad range of naturally dynamic environments, as well as their capacity to adapt to habitat loss and directional environmental change. The goal of the meeting will be to bring together fish scientists from a broad range of disciplines, to address questions focused on ecological and life-history research, evolutionary biology, conservation and invasion biology, as well as on the anthropogenic impacts on fish populations and communities. We will also include a consideration of the statistical tools to enable us to understand responses to change.
This conference will seek to integrate current knowledge from fish biologists and fisheries scientists from around the world, working from the molecular through to the ecosystem level, in freshwaters and marine habitats, to generate a synthetic understanding of the impact of anthropogenic changes on the biology of fish and the ecology of fish populations.
Symposium themes and sub-themes will include:

• Sex and reproduction in a dynamic world
• Feeding in a dynamic world
• Behaviour in a dynamic world
• Evolutionary adaptations over contemporary timescales
• Eco-evolutionary dynamics
• Population and community consequences of a dynamic world
• Phenotypic plasticity in a dynamic world
• Analysing dynamic worlds
• Fish conservation in a dynamic world
• Fisheries management in a dynamic world
• Invasion ecology in a dynamic world
• Predator-prey interactions in a dynamic world
• Parasites, pathogens and diseases in a dynamic world
• Impacts of anthropogenic noise and ecological stressors