The 2nd Asellus symposium was held online

November 19, 2021 2 minute read

On November 26th 2021, the 2nd Asellus Symposium was held online. There were some 40+ registered participants from institutions in 14 countries. Below you can find the final program, links to all recorded talks on youtube (unlisted) and a sumary of the discussion notes.

It was great to see the broad range of topics that were covered in presentations and during the discussion sessions (see synthesis of insight below) - from selective forces and determinants of pigmentation, intraspecific variation in innovativeness and behavioural responses to predator cues, foraging ecology and life-history variation, and species interactions (host-parasite, host-microbiome, predator-prey) to phylogeography and microevolution, along the surface-waterpipe-cave continuum, as well as natural and human-impacted environments.

The broad range of methods that are already being used - different phenotyping methods (microscopy, computer vision techniques for image and video analyses e.g. https://www.phenopype.org, microbiomics and metabolomics), genomics (several draft genomes have been attempted/are in preparation), lab rearing and maintenance, and long-term data acquisition - that can be shared across the community set the stage for highly integrative studies.

This clearly shows that Asellus aquaticus is ready to fledge as a model system for eco-evo-devo studies both for basic and applied questions. At the same time, several knowledge gaps were identified and for a very short non-exhaustive summary, these include poor understanding of basic requirements of A. aquaticus (e.g. in lab rearing), lack of a well-annotated genome, and limited knowledge on sexual selection and phenology.