07 January 2008

SICB 2008 review

San Antonio skylineTo anyone who heard about this page at the recent SICB meeting in San Antonio -- welcome!

The SICB meeting was a far more eventful meeting for me personally than I expected. I hadn't fully realized the extent of the decapod crustacean contingent that would be there. It was really wonderful for me to meet a lot of people that I knew only by their published papers. Being a neuroethologist, I usually go to neurobiology and animal behaviour kinds of meetings, and hadn't really interacted with the crustie researchers at conferences very often before.

I had a chance to talk to a lot of people about Marmorkrebs, and gleaned some news, both good and bad. The good news was to learn of another paper about Marmokrebs coming out in The Journal of Experimental Biology in the next few months. The abstract will be posted here when it is published, as usual.

The bad news -- and it is very bad -- is that Marmorkrebs have now been found in Madagascar. Crayfish are harvested quite extensively there, as you can see in the video below, from the WWF.



While Marmokrebs are wonderful research animals, their potential as pests is just as great.

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