Biological systems – ranging from bacteria and single cells, to colonies and multicellular species or even groups of organisms, must thrive in various potentially harsh and ever-changing environmental conditions.
To cope with environmental changes a variety adaptation strategies have evolved, including gene regulation, locomotion and navigation in complex environments, intracellular re-arrangements or metabolic responses. These strategies can only be robust, if they are the result of an intricate decision-making process by discriminating unimportant from important stimuli, integrating environmental cues and receptor inputs and even anticipating changes in the environment via predictive cues. Intriguingly, every species has their own challenges and ecological contexts to show such behaviour. By studying a large variety of species and contexts, the underlying rules of adaptation can be extracted and described in terms of physical mechanisms. The accomplishment of such scientific endeavour requires a wide range of topics and academic backgrounds of researchers from fields of Physics, Biology and Mathematics.