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Introduction

This symposium is in celebration of our work from a five year collaborative project that began in 2005, funded by the Assembling the tree of life program at NSF. To find out more about our project, you can visit our website (slide of our homepage).

Today you are going to see talks about the relationships and evolution of nearly every major lineage of Cnidaria. From these studies, we are getting a much better picture of patterns of diversification, biogeographic distrubutions, patterns of invasion from shallow water to deep and vice versa, and life cycle evolution. All of these themes will be recurrent in the talks you will see today.

This project represents a truly collaborative effort by not only the PIs and co-PIs, but an entire community of researchers, which are scrolling on the screen behind me. Aside from the work that will be presented here today, I would like to summarize a few of the accomplishments of our project:

Members of our projects have collected specimens in South Africa, Chile, Japan, Panama, Moorea, Singapore, the Mid-Atlantic, Australia, Philippines, to name a few places. These collaborative field projects have forged strong partnerships with local researchers, partnerships that we are especially grateful for and proud of.

We have collected (or have had collected for us some 3,200 vouchered specimens from all over the world by all methods of collecting and at all ranges of depths. We have generated molecular data from over 1100 specimens and sampled over 70% of Cnidarian families.

As you will see, these sequences have helped us to develop a robust and stable framework through which we can interpret the diversity of this ancient lineage. Other sources of evidence we have been exploring with our improved phylogenetic perspective are fossils, gene expression, anatomy and the ultrastructure of nematocysts.

Because Cnidaria is such a pivotal group for understanding the early diversification of animals, the trees we will be discussing are perhaps most powerful as we join them to these and other kinds of data, so that we may better understand the origin of symmetry, organs, tissues, immune systems, nervous systems, and the genetic mechanisms that drive these features.

Through the course of this project we have published at last count, 60 papers and trained 3 postdocs, 20 graduate students and over 40 undergraduates. This training of the next generation of cnidarian systematists is perhaps the biggest accomplishment of this project and one that will certainly carry on well after this official project has been completed.

I would like to thank all of those that participated and worked on the project and especially thank NSF for their investment. Thank you for joining us this morning.