A history of the international conferences on coelenterate biology

Abstract

The origin of this series of conferences, like the evolution of the coelenterates themselves, is a somewhat murky topic as there are several meetings that could claim to have been the first. One of these was the hydra meeting organized by W. F. Loomis and H. M. Lenhoff at Coral Gables, Florida, in March 1961 (Lenhoff & Loomis, 1961) and another was the symposium arranged by L. M. Passano on behalf of the Comparative Physiology Division of the American Society of Zoologists, held in Knoxville, Tennessee in December 1964 (Crowell, 1965). Both of these were rather specialized gatherings, however, and it has come to be tacitly accepted that the first in the series of international coelenterate conferences was the one set up by W. J. Rees at the Zoological Society of London in March 1965, the papers from which were published in The Cnidaria and their Evolution (Rees, 1966). This conference was not, to my knowledge, planned as the first in a series, but several people in the field at the time felt that it would be a good thing to have another meeting within a few years. In October 1969, while attending the Primo Simposio Internacional de Zoofilogenia in Salamanca, Bernhard Werner and I met in a local tavern as a self-appointed, ad hoc committee to decide where the next conference should be held. The minutes of this meeting have not survived, but I recall that Werner had friends and contacts in Japan, and was planning to study at the Seto Marine Biology Laboratory during 1971. We agreed that Japan, the land of Taku Komai and Tohru Uchida, would be the ideal place to have