Finally, to really understand how phenotype affects an organism’s
fitness, it is imperative to study the performance of a given
morphology in the context of its environment. In this way we can
learn how functional attributes contribute to advantages in feeding,
evading predation, and rearing young – all of which are ultimately
responsible for an individual to pass along its genes. Ecologically
important questions, like those concerned with climate change and
habitat modification, hinge upon our understanding of the functional
morphology and adaptive physiology of the organisms in an
ecosystem in question. For example,to understand how building or
removing dams affects fish populations, we need not only data on
the life of undisturbed populations, but also experimental data on
how fishes respond to large-scale changes in flow velocity and perturbation
within a short period of time. Here, again, bio-inspired
robotics and computer models can help answer these broad questions
by increasing the parameter space for forecasting anticipated conditions.