Malacological Society of London

The World Congress of Malacology, organised by the Western Australian Museum (WAM) and University of Western Australia (UWA), was held on the magnificent Crawley campus of UWA overlooking Matilda Bay on the Swan Estuary, from 11 to 16^th July 2004. The weather remained fine throughout, and although this was mid-winter, daytime temperatures were similar to an early English summer and many of the trees were in bloom on the campus and in the magnificent 400+ hectare King’s Park and Botanic Garden between the University and central Perth. Over 300 delegates representing more than 40 countries attended the congress. Generous provisions of travel grants from Unitas enabled many applicants to attend, and the Malacological Society of London provided travel grants for a further three participants.

The registration icebreaker was held in the Western Australian Museum on the Sunday evening when we were afforded the first opportunity to taste the appropriately named and labelled ‘Seashells’ Wines produced in Balingup near the renowned Margaret River region of Western Australia by Barry Wilson – former curator of molluscs at WAM. ‘Seashells’ wine was also donated by John Jackson of the Odyssey Publishing Group for other social functions during the Congress.

Lunches were included in the registration fee, a very welcome innovation for UNITAS as it allowed delegates to either discuss the burning issues of the day or relax without the usual mad scramble to find somewhere to eat. Lunches and snacks provided at coffee breaks were of impeccable standard.

The Congress was officially launched by the Hon Sheila McHale, MLA, Minister for Community Development, Women’s Interests, Seniors and Youth, Disability Services, Culture and the Arts. Delegates were welcomed to the University by Professor Alistar Roberson, Dean of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

Social Programme

The poster session, a cheese and wine function on Tuesday evening in the student cafeteria, bridged the formal oral presentations and the social programme as it afforded the opportunity to see additional ongoing work in a more relaxed environment.

The mid-conference break offered a choice from tours to Caversham Wildlife Park and AQWA, the Aquarium of Western Australia; a cruise down the Swan River to Freemantle (Freo) and on to Rottnest Island, which takes its name from the large ’rats’ (Quokkas – Setonix branchyuras) noted by the early Dutch explorers of the island, for lunch and an island tour; diving off Rottnest and wine and chocolate tasting in the Swan Valley, north of Perth.

The congress concluded with a splendid dinner on the Friday, at Burswood on Swan overlooking the lights of Perth reflected in the Swan River (see back page), after which prizes were presented to students and we danced the night away and bade our farewells until the next congress.

The Science

After the formalities of the launch, the rest of the first day was devoted to plenary presentations. In the opening address, Fred Wells, President of Unitas and Senior Curator Malacology, WAM, stressed the vastness of Western Australia – a third of the continent, with 12 000 km of coastline - and outlined early expeditions to the region. The tropical north coast, part of the vast Indo-Pacific has many endemic coastal molluscs, but the fauna of the offshore coral reef atolls is very different from that of the coast. The coral reefs rank seventh in total biodiversity of the world’s 18 Biodiversity Hotspots, second in restricted range species, but low (15th) in threats. The south coast is part of the southern Australian Warm Temperate Province. The west coast is an overlap zone influenced by the recently described southward Leeuwin current. The salinity of lakes restricts freshwater diversity, but the land molluscs are diverse, although some have extremely restricted ranges.

Four parallel sessions were needed for over 200 presented papers on topics including ecology, fisheries and aquaculture, phylogeny, bivalves, land snails, opisthobranchs, reproduction and development and a range of other contributed papers.

Several speakers in the plenary sessions spoke on the phylogeny of molluscs. Gerhard Haszprunar (Munich) and A. Wanninger (Copenhagen) considered the Mollusca in the broader evolutionary picture by proposing a direct sister group relationship between the Mollusca and Entoprocta based on structural studies of the creeping larvae of the entoproct Loxosoma, and looked forward to supporting molecular evidence.

Thereafter several talks covered aspects of molluscan phylogeny and ecology, two of the symposia themes. Pavel Yu Parkhaev (Palaeontological Institute, Moscow) reviewed the impacts of the discovery of living monoplacophorans and the chemical extraction of microfossils developed in the mid-1960s on the interpretation of Cambrian univalved molluscs. David Lindberg (California, Berkeley) and Winston Ponder (Australian Museum, Sydney) criticised the lack of attention given by the broader scientific community to a modern taxonomy of gastropods arising from the use of new character sets and molecular analyses. Alex Nützel (Palaeontological Institute, Erlangen) reviewed the caenogastropods of the late Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic. Morphological characters support the monophyly of crown-group caenogastropods, but convergence of shell characters bedevils the identification of the Palaeozoic stem-group. Daniel Geiger (Santa Barbara Museum) reviewed vetigastropod evolution (previously part of archaeogastropoda), with gill bursicles - cavities on the gill – as its defining character. The molecular and morphological phylogenies are inconsistent, and Trochoidea are probably not monophyletic. Annie Lindgren & Michele Nishigushi (New Mexico) combined molecular and morphological data to test the relationships between cephalopod families. The Cephalopoda, Nautiloidea, Coleoidea and Decabrachia appear to be monophyletic, but the Octobrachia are not.

Whitman Miller (Smithsonian Environmental Research Center) opened the ecology of molluscs symposium, by considering the importance of ecological invasions on molluscan ecology and biodiversity. Molluscs are tied to the ecology of many biological communities, so they present a large target for global change, and are both invaders and the invaded. In coastal USA, molluscan invasions rank second only to those by crustaceans. Littorina littorea is now the commonest gastropod in New England states since its introduction in 1840, competitively excluding the native Ilyanassa obsoleta. Most invasions enter via shipping (formerly as hull foulers, now in water ballast) or fisheries: Chesapeake oysters are declining in part due to MSX oyster disease introduced with Crassostrea gigas. 70% of humans live on coasts, and Fabio Bulleri (Bologna) described the effects of coastal urbanisation on marine molluscs. In the northern Adriatic, the almost continuous breakwaters result in a loss of recruitment, increased epibiont growth, and increase in filter feeders and grazers, and also act as stepping stones to connect previously isolated areas. Tasman Crowe (Dublin) described the effects of loss of biodiversity through human impacts in marine ecosystems. The scope for growth (SFG) of mussels is a widely used indicator of integrated environmental stress, but the diversity of macrofaunal communities associated with mussels is also reduced at UK sites with low SFG. The loss of diversity of grazing gastropods also affects the diversity and productivity of intertidal algal communities – but the identity of grazing species rather than their number was more important. Thus loss of the limpets Patella ulyssiponensis leads to an increase in macroalgal cover which can only be offset by increased densities of Littorina littorea and Gibbula umbilicalis.

At the end of the first day, Tony Underwood reflected on the presentations and emphasised the contributions made by plenary speakers - particularly those who represented a newer generation, which showed that the future of molluscan research was in good hands.

Tuesday and Thursday involved early starts to hear keynote addresses by Sandra Shumway (Connecticut) and Robert Cameron (Sheffield). Opening the Molluscan Aquaculture and Fisheries sessions, Sandra Shumway took us on a grand tour that covered the early students of malacology and the impact of state-of-the-art instrumentation and computation, improved hatchery techniques and more efficient fishing gear on our understanding of molluscs. She emphasised the need to ask the right questions and not to overlook early work that was cutting edge in its day and often provided insights that are being confirmed today. In opening the programme on Pattern and Process in land mollusc diversity, Robert Cameron, Beata Pokryszko and Fred Wells reviewed the vast and meticulous contribution of the late Alan Solem, and the use of this work to inform current conservation planning in Western Australia. Solem’s taxonomic studies of Pacific Island endodontoids enabled him to analyse patterns of distribution – exposing the limitations of MacArthur and Wilson’s equilibrium theory by drawing attention to in situ speciation. His identification of remarkable allopatric distributions amongst Australian camaenids, with many very small scale distributions, allowed him to contrast these with the much richer faunas of New Zealand, where many congeners coexist.

There were also sessions on Opisthobranchs, Reproduction and Development, Bivalve Systematics, and a general session. Two recurring themes were the need to incorporate fossil lineages into trees erected from molecular data and the overthrowing of groups based on morphological similarities arising from convergence. As examples, the lucinoids are not monophyletic, so the thyasirid and lucinid bivalves appear to have independently acquired bacterial chemosymbiosis. The symbiosis of some aeolidoid nudibranchs with dinoflagellates of the genus Symbiodinium obtained from their octocoralline food was a key innovation for radiation. Leptoconchus snails which parasitize mushroom corals show few differences in shell morphology, yet molecular data indicate there to be at least 18 species, each restricted to its own host coral species.

Fred Wells and the other members of the organising committee and the symposium organisers are to be thanked for their hard work and congratulated on a successful meeting.

Dai Roberts & Bill Bailey

Copies of the Abstracts (Molluscan Megadiversity: Sea, Land and Freshwater, edited by Fred E Wells, ISBN 1920843124) may be purchased for $Aus 44, postage included, from The Western Australian Museum, Perth, Western Australia 6000, attention Dr Fred E Wells.

Unitas Malacologica Student Awards

Best Talks:

1^st prize ($Aus 500) Adriaan Gittenberger, Museum of Natural History, Leiden, The Netherlands, for work on phylogenies and distributions of mushroom corals and associated parasitic gastropods.

2^nd prize ($Aus 300) Tanya Compton, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, for work on fundamental niches as driving factors in marine bivalve diversity.

3^rd prize (6 y subscription to Unitas) Manual Malaquias, Natural History Museum London, for work on systematics and evolution of bullids.

Best Posters:

1^st prize ($Aus 500) Rosemary Golding, University of Sydney, for studies of Australian Amphibolids.

2^nd prize ($Aus 300) Tshifhiwa Nangammbi, Natal museum and University of Kwazulu Natal, for a mtDNA study of the phylogeny of South African Tricolia (Turbinidae)

3^rd prize (6 y subscription to Unitas) Christian Albrecht, J W Goethe University, Frankfurt, for studies of speciation in Lake Ohrid Ancylus, and a molecular phylogenetic perspective on evolution of freshwater basommatophorans.

Malacological Society of London Awards

The Sir Charles Maurice Yonge Award (£200) for best presentation on bivalves was awarded to Ilya Temkin of the American Museum of Natural History, for a review of superfamily Pterioidea.

The best student presentation (3 yr subscription to The Society) was made to Stephanie Huff, Harvard University, for her oral presentation on phylogeny of basal gastropods.

Travel Grants

Three travel grants of € 800 each were awarded to participants at the World congress of Malacology. The recipients were

Gisele Orlandi Introini, Unisity Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, to present work on spermatozoan morphology of Brachidontes spp. (Bivalvia) from southern Brazil;

T S Liew, University Malaysia Sabah, to present work on disturbance and snail diversity in Kinabatangan Valley, Sabah; and

I A Manalo, De La Salle University, Manila, to present work on taxonomic variations in penis and gonads of four species of Oliva from the Philippines.

Views from the Congress.