Finally, to really understand how phenotype affects an organ-ism’s fitness, it is imperative to study the performance of a givenmorphology in the context of its environment. In this way we canlearn how functional attributes contribute to advantages in feeding,evading predation, and rearing young – all of which are ultimatelyresponsible for an individual to pass along its genes. Ecologicallyimportant questions, like those concerned with climate change andhabitat modification, hinge upon our understanding of the func-tional morphology and adaptive physiology of the organisms in anecosystem in question. For example, to understand how building orremoving dams affects fish populations, we need not only data onthe life of undisturbed populations, but also experimental data onhow fishes respond to large-scale changes in flow velocity and per-turbation within a short period of time. Here, again, bio-inspiredrobotics and computer models can help answer these broad ques-tions by increasing the parameter space for forecasting anticipatedconditions.