Abstracts of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society. “Phylogenetics and Evolutionary Biology”

Abstract

The 23rd annual meeting of the Willi Hennig Society took place in Paris with the support of Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle and CNRS (Centre National de la recherche Scientifique), from the 18th to the 23rd of July 2004. Ninety four participants from 16 countries presented 67 talks and 11 posters. The symposia comprised both methodological contributions and strong analyses of case studies, focusing on hot topics in systematics, methodological advances in phylogenetic analysis, epistemology, phylogenetic analysis of behavioral and ecological traits, phylogeny and coevolution of microbial symbioses, taxon and character sampling, biogeography, and the evolution of arthropods. The student participation was very high with 30 student talks (45%) distributed among all symposia, showing the same healthy trend seen in previous meetings. The present abstracts show how much systematics and phylogenetics are scientifically growing and contribute significantly to all research fields of evolutionary biology in the framework of comparative biology.The Student Awards Committee (Cyrille D'Haese, Diana Lipscomb, John Wenzel) nominated the following winners: Johannes Bergsten, the Hennig Prize ($1000) for “Antagonistic coevolution between the sexes in diving‐beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae); phylogeny and experiments in reciprocal illumination”, Mahé Ben Hamed, the Brundin Prize ($500) for “Reconstructing the history of Chinese through lexicon. Cladistics, distances and trees” and Lara Lopardo, the Rosen Prize ($250) for the poster “Chilean Anapids and Their Webs, a Phylogenetic Approach (Araneae, Anapidae)”.© The Willi Hennig Society 2004.