22/10/12

From Cliff Ragsdale: Cephalopod Genomics

The White Paper "Cephalopod Genomics: A Plan of Strategies and Organization" has now been published:

http://standardsingenomics.org/index.php/sigen/article/view/sigs.3136559/sigs.3136559_pdf

08/07/2012

From Cliff Ragsdale: Cephalopod Genomics

Dear colleagues,

I organized a NESCent Catalysis Group Meeting at the end of May on Cephalopod Genomics. Its purpose was to bring together cephalopod biologists, bioinformaticians and genomicists to develop strategies for moving the cephalopod community beyond its current genome-poor state.

One goal of the meeting was to develop mechanisms for data exchanges and communication among groups pursuing cephalopod genomes and transcriptomes. A second goal was to prepare a White Paper that researchers could draw on in applying for funding.

Before public distribution, we would like to include a list of scientists who support the goals of the White Paper.

.....

Thank you,
with best wishes,
Cliff
--
=======================================================================
Cliff Ragsdale cragsdale@uchicago.edu
Department of Neurobiology 773-702-9609
The University of Chicago 773-702-2896 (LAB)
947 E. 58th St 773-702-1216 (FAX)
Chicago, IL 60637 http://ragslab.bsd.uchicago.edu/
=======================================================================

21/05/2012

From Erica Vidal: CIAC 2012 Conference Hotel Accommodation

Dear Colleagues,

The Majestic Palace Hotel was blocked for reservations for the CIAC 2012 Symposium. Thus, do not try to make your reservation through the hotel web site or you will receive a message saying the hotel is fully booked.

When you are ready to make your accommodation reservation in Florianópolis, go to the CIAC 2012 Symposium web site (www.ciac2012brazil.com.br), click on the link: Hotel Accommodation and then click on: For information on travel and accommodation, please CLICK HERE.

Hope you will find this information helpful and will make you reservation soon! Do not wait until the Majestic hotel is fully booked (see the file attached)!

Warmest best wishes,

Érica

CIAC Best Paper Award

Announcing the triennial CIAC award for excellence in published cephalopod research: As part of its role to encourage high quality and innovative science, the Cephalopod International Advisory Council (CIAC) is sponsoring an award for the most significant journal article published over the period since the last CIAC symposium (2009-2012 inclusive).

Nomination criteria:
• Papers may be nominated by the author team or a third party
• All research or review articles published by the nomination date below may be submitted
• Interdisciplinary papers are particularly encouraged
• Papers will be evaluated based on the likely impact of the research, and on the improvements made to our understanding of the cephalopoda

Application guidelines:
• Please email an electronic copy of the paper along with a Word • document listing the paper title, author status (e.g. student/researcher) and
• A concise summary (200 words maximum) outlining the importance of the findings, techniques developed, or synthesis of the review
• Name the person nominating the paper

Please email your nomination by July 15th 2012 to Annie Lindgren AND Warwick Sauer

From Erica Vidal: CIAC 2012 Conference

Dear colleagues,

Both early registration and abstract submission for the forthcoming CIAC 2012 Symposium are now open. Please visit the CIAC 2012 web site,

www.ciac2012brazil.com.br

I look forward to seeing all of you in Florianópolis in October!

Warmest regards,

Érica Vidal
(On behalf of the CIAC 2012 Organizing Committee)

27/04/12

From Liz Shea: cephalopod session at the American Malacological Society meeting

The 2012 American Malacological Society meeting will be held this June 16 - 21 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There will be a themed session on cephalopods on Monday, June 18th. Please consider joining us for what will be a low key, fun event. All topics are welcome - evolution, ecology, behavior, physiology, biomechanics, or any other aspect of cephalopod biology. Come and get ready for Brazil!

Deadlines are coming up quickly - early registration and abstracts are due May 1st. Full registration is $180 for AMS members, $250 for non-members and $100 for students and includes the welcome party, banquet and reception at the Academy of Natural Sciences. One day registration is $50, but does not include any festivities. Hotel reservations are due May 17th for best rates and availability.

All forms and more information can be found at the AMS website: www.malacological.org

Questions about the cephalopod session can be directed to Liz Shea at eshea@delmnh.org or 302.658.9111 x319. Please send general questions about the meeting to Paul Callomon at: callomon@ansp.org.

Hope to see you there!
Liz

05/04/12

From Jennifer Smith Robertson: - Jennier found this link to the results of the All England Squid Fishing Championship!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9241894/All-England-Squid-Championships-descends-into-farce-as-angler-who-caught-a-1cm-specimin-declared-winner.html

Here is a previous news item on squid pheromones:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110210122926.htm

05/02/11

From Angel Gonzalez: 35th Larval Fish Conference (which includes a session on cephalopod early life history)

2011 LFC – Call for Abstracts

The 35th Larval Fish Conference will be held in historic downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, USA during the week of May 22nd-26th, 2011. The local organizing committee, consisting of Jeff Buckel (North Carolina State University), Tom Lankford (UNCW) and Fred Scharf (UNCW), invite you to consider submitting an abstract to participate in this year’s event. The meeting will begin on Sunday evening with a welcome social along the Cape Fear riverfront. The technical session will start on Monday morning with a special plenary talk delivered by Dr. Ed Houde from the University of Maryland - Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and will continue through Thursday. We have already established several theme sessions and are in the process of finalizing others, see details below. We’re also planning for a separate poster session during one of the afternoons to enable full focus on the poster contributions during a designated block of time. Beyond the welcoming social on Sunday, we also have an evening planned on the fantail of the USS North Carolina, a decommissioned WWII battleship maintained in Wilmington. The banquet will be held at the historic Bellamy mansion, a restored antebellum home built just prior to the start of the Civil War. Primary lodging accommodations will be provided by the Best Western Coastline Inn, with riverfront views from every room. The technical session will take place directly adjacent to the hotel for added convenience and there are a multitude of restaurants, shops, and bars all within walking distance. Wilmington International Airport is serviced by Delta and USAirways and can be reached from most major US cities with one connection. The airport offers easy access to the historic downtown area via a 10-minute taxi ride. We are working hard to keep registration costs down, particularly for students, and plan to have the total costs finalized by early February. We hope to have Registration and abstract submission pages up and running no later than Feb 15th. Please check the link for the 35th LFC at http://www.larvalfishcon.org for regular updates and new information.

Theme sessions

The 2011 LFC will have several theme sessions, designed to include a combination of invited and contributed papers on topics of broad interest to members of the section. Each of the sessions is open to contributions by any author whose paper is aligned with the respective themes. If you would like to have your paper considered for inclusion in a theme session, you will be able to indicate a specific theme session during the abstract submission process. Alternatively, there will be an option for general contributed papers.

(The session most relevant to us is:)

Cephalopod early life history

Organized by Michelle Staudinger, University of North Carolina Wilmington (staudingerm@uncw.edu)

Description: The increased demands of global fisheries on cephalopods requires an firm understanding of their ecological role in marine ecosystems, relationships with other fishery resources, and knowledge of the underlying environmental factors affecting growth, distribution, and survival. This theme session is open to all areas of cephalopod early life history however, topics encompassing the ecology of early life stages, spatial and temporal distributions of paralarvae in the environment, factors affecting recruitment variation, impacts of climate change and ocean acidification, use of new techniques for identifying paralarvae, and supporting age and growth studies are especially encouraged. Contributions from field, laboratory, and modeling approaches are welcome.

We are still finalizing plans for some of the theme sessions and will have updated information related to each session by the time registration and abstract submission opens (Feb 15th). In addition, if a member has a specific idea for a theme session that they would like to organize, please contact either Jeff (jeffrey_buckel@ncsu.edu), Tom (lankfordt@uncw.edu), or Fred (scharff@uncw.edu) to discuss it further. We are looking forward to seeing everyone in May.

19/01/11

EuroCeph 2011 (contact info@euroceph.org)

Cephalopod Biology Research in the 21st Century - A European Perspective

7th - 10th April 2011, Vico Equense, Naples, Italy

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that 2011 Euroceph Abstract Submission is now open! Please visit the website http://www.euroceph.org or http://euroceph.org for updates. The conference website will continue to evolve as we get closer to the conference dates. Features such as Program updates, Speakers and Community, General Info will be added over the next few weeks and then updated continually. At the same time we remind all of you that Early Bird Registration will close soon (January 21th, 2011). As you noticed, the registration fee includes conference fees, accommodation for three nights, continental breakfast, two refreshment breaks, light lunch and evening meal. A number of student meeting awards will be available; the award will assign complimentary registration for the EuroCeph2011 meeting.

Organisers and Programme Committee: Graziano Fiorito (Italy), Paul Andrews (UK), Ludovic Dickel (France), Nadav Shashar (Israel)

Local Organizing Committee - Comitato Studi EuroCeph: Graziano Fiorito (Italy), Paul Andrews (UK), Giovanna Ponte (Italy), Anna Maria Grimaldi (Italy), Roberta Lauro (Italy)

Please distribute this email to your colleagues!

On behalf of the EuroCeph Committees, with our sincere regards

Graziano Fiorito and Paul Andrews

03/01/11

From Dirk Fuchs: 4th Intern. Symposium Coleoid Cephalopods Through Time 2011 Stuttgart - Call for registration and presentations

Dear Cephalopodologists,

First I wish you all a Happy New Year with many publications and accepted applications! Additionally, I want to inform you that registration and acceptance of abstracts for the 4th International Symposium "Coleoid Cephalopods Through Time" has started. We are happy to announce that the following keynote speakers:

Jörg Mutterlose (Bochum, Germany)
Kazushige Tanabe (Tokyo, Japan)
Michael Vecchione (Washington, USA)
Sandra Navet (Paris, France)

For more information please find enclosed the second circular or visit our homepage (see also first circular)

http://www.naturkundemuseum-bw.de/stuttgart/tagungen/

Archived news

Cephalopod International Advisory Council Symposium: Brazil, 2012

Slide show (pdf) presented in Vigo, 2009

Brazil will become the first South American nation to host a CIAC symposium, as the country won a majority of the votes of the CIAC Executive Council in Vigo. Brazil is also much in evidence in the world as the first South American country to host the Olympic Games of 2016. In between, the country will also host the 2014 World Cup. It seems that the time has come for Brazil, the largest and the only Portuguese speaking country in South America.

The main rationale for a CIAC symposium in South America was that the cephalopod researcher community has grown considerably in this continent in last few years. This can be partially explained by the development of cephalopod research in nearly all South American countries, but also by the demand of knowledge on important commercially exploited cephalopods (e.g., Dosidicus gigas in Mexico and Peru; Illex argentinus in Brazil and Argentina, and octopus species in Chile). Therefore, there is a clear demand for a CIAC Symposium in South America, what would also help to potentially increase the participation of researchers and students from South America countries.

Brazil encompasses all the desirable conditions to fulfill this demand. The country has an expressive and growing number of cephalopod researches, whom have been delivering scientific contributions to the mainstream science on a regular basis. Operational conditions are attractive to international events, not only because of the excellent infrastructure for congresses and meetings, but also because of the lower costs for accommodations and catering in relation to Northern Hemisphere countries. In addition, Brazil is a tropical country with a multi-ethnic people and breathtaking scenery. Some of the world´s most exciting destinations lie inside of Brazil's borders. From white-sand beaches and tropical islands stretched over more than 8000 Km along the Atlantic coast to inland unique biomas, like the Pantanal and the Amazon and Atlantic forests congregating some of the greatest biodiversity of the planet, there will be plenty of room for entertainment and adventure. Given the country innumerable charms, a CIAC symposium in Brazil will certainly contribute with high standard scientific outputs, while offering the attendees a pleasant and friendly environment with memorable moments of leisure, not to mention the experience of the music, dance, food and nature.

Two cities might host the Symposium, Florianópolis and Curitiba. These cities are located 300 Km apart and are the State Capitals of Paraná and Santa Catarina respectively. Flight times from São Paulo-Guarulhos airport, the main international airport in Brasil, to Florianópolis or Curitiba are less than 1h. Florianópolis, is one of the three Brazilian´s state capital islands and is composed by one Main Island, a small continental part and small surrounding islands. The city has a population of about 480.000, and around 100 beautiful beaches, many of which are perfect places for a number of water sports, like surfing, kayaking, and scuba diving. The diverse scenery offers a tranquil and peaceful stay, while cultural activities and fine seafood and local gastronomy will certainly satisfy a broad range of tastes. The city's privileged infrastructure for scientific meetings is renowned, and a number of important international events had already been held in Florianópolis major resorts. Curitiba is a modern and cosmopolitan capital city with almost 1.8 million inhabitants. It is considered to be the "ecological capital" of Brazil, having a leading position in urban and ecological solutions. The emphasis in Curitiba is protecting the environment with dozens of urban parks and gardens. As a result, the city provides one of the highest standards for life quality within the country and is known as a very pleasant place to live. Curitiba is located 934 m above sea level and separated from the coast by the 'Serra do Mar' a mountain range belonging to one of the most preserved areas of the Atlantic Forest.

The organizing committee is already discussing the logistics for this conference and will offer more details about the meeting in the next CIAC newsletter. We are looking forward to seeing you in BRAZIL!

(In case you haven't spotted this elsewhere, the decision is to go to Florianopolis. Full conference details are here.)

CIAC is the Cephalopod International Advisory Council (not to be confused with the Conference on Algorithms and Complexity, Computer Incident Advisory Capability, or any of the other CIACs out there!)

Founded in 1983, the aims of CIAC are to stimulate, accelerate and influence the direction of cephalopod research, to provide help and advice on aspects of cephalopod biology, including those relevant to the management of the increasingly important cephalopod fisheries, and to spread information on past and current research. Its main activities are:

1. The holding of CIAC Workshop/Symposia every 3 years and the publication of the results in book or journal form.
2. The organisation of CIAC Joint Meetings with fisheries organisations, societies, or laboratories for exchange of information and usually the publication of papers and/or training manuals.
3. The endorsement of meetings organised by any cephalopod workers who provide evidence to CIAC of the value and feasibility of a meeting being planned.
4. The production of a newsletter, replaced more recently by an e-mail discussion list (fastmoll).
5. Support for various cephalopod-related initiatives. In the past these included the publication and updating of a Directory of English translations of Research Publications in Other Languages, a List of Cephalopod Workers of the World, a Computerised Bibliography of Cephalopod Research, Keys for the Identification of Cephalopods, and State of the Art papers in selected areas of research. Current initiatives include the cephalopod pages of the Encyclopedia of Life.

At present CIAC comprises a "Council", members of which are proposed by delegates at the CIAC conferences and voted on by the existing Council. Council members serve for 6 years (see CIAC by-laws for further details). The Council meets at every designated CIAC Workshop/Symposium. These Council Meetings may be divided into several continuous sittings or sessions. The objectives of these meetings are to plan and implement the aims of the Council as described above.

At all CIAC Workshops/Symposia there will be an Open Meeting, presided over by the President or Executive Secretary of CIAC, to which anyone interested in CIAC and its aims may come and speak on subjects of relevance to CIAC, at which participants will be asked for nominations for membership of Council, and at which proposals for CIAC Workshops/Symposia may be made.

The photograph below shows the members of the first CIAC Executive Council (plus the editor of the CIAC Newsletter, Marion Nixon) in 1985. Standing, left to right: Ron O'Dor, Nancy Voss, Gilbert Voss, John Messenger, Marion Nixon, Eric Hochberg, Richard Young and Malcolm Clarke. Crouching, left to right: Sigurd v. Boletzky, Clyde Roper, Katy Mangold, Angel Guerra, C.C. Lu and John Wormuth. The photo was taken adjacent to the Laboratorire Arago (Banyuls-sur-Mer, France) in June 1985, during the International Symposium on the Early Growth Stages of Cephalopods (CIAC 1985). (Photo supplied by Angel Guerra)