Videos of presentations made at the 2017 CephsInAction/CIAC joint meeting in Heraklion, Greece have been uploaded, thanks to work by Fedor Lischenko and colleagues, to the Curious CEPH YouTube channel. So please head over there and check out all of the amazing and cutting edge discussions of cephalopod science on display!
The following article was originally written by Ian Gleadall for the CIAC newsletter, but was never published. Ian has generously provided the article to us to be posted here. It describes a reunion to celebrate Kyoji Tasaki that took place in 2014, and the contributions that he and several of his colleagues attending this dinner made to our current understanding of cephalopod vision.
Eye, Cephalopod
Ian Gleadall. Sendai, Japan, September, 2014
Recently, Yasuo Tsukahara arranged a small dinner party to celebrate the 90th birthday of Kyoji Tasaki, former Head of the 2nd Department of Physiology in the pure research wing of the Medical School at Tohoku University in Sendai. This group of people has not met together for many years and Yasuo reasoned that it would be better and happier to meet now rather than waiting around to meet at the funeral of the first one to succumb to Old Father Time.
On the 12th of July of this year, then, the group met together at a restaurant in downtown Sendai. The author of this account (Ian Gleadall) was also invited, as a former post-doc. who worked briefly in the 2nd Dept. of Physiology just before Kyoji Tasaki retired. The attendees included a number of former students and friends of Kyoji Tasaki, but among this group were 3 people (Tasaki himself, Hitoshi Suzuki and Yasuo Tsukahara) who have made significant contributions to the vision physiology of cephalopods, hence the playful paraphrasing of the well-known science fiction title “I, Robot.” This article provides a brief account of these researchers and their contributions, along with a mention of others who facilitated their research.
Dr. Heather Judkins has sent out an announcement for workshops for CIAC 2018:
In conjunction with the 2018 CIAC conference being held in St. Petersburg, FL Nov. 12-16, 2018, we are going to have 2 days before the conference (Nov. 10 and 11th) to conduct cephalopod-related workshops.
We are currently accepting both ideas for workshops as well as people who would like to lead the workshops! Please send me a short description of a workshop that you would like to participate in and let me know if you’re willing to lead/co-lead a workshop. We would like to come away from these workshops with some kind of product or skill learned as a result of attending.
Please send me your descriptions by April 25, 2017 (Judkins@mail.usf.edu). We will narrow down the options and send out options to the community to vote on the ones we’d like to have!
Thank you for your help in building a great program for CIAC 2018!
The programme for the Heraklion meeting is now available on the CephsInAction website. Look forward to seeing lots of you there!
Heraklion programme 28th – 31st March
The CIAC Instagram account is live! It is being run by Kelley Voss. The plan is to share interesting images and videos from the world of cephalopod research — live animals, specimens, microscope images, illustrations, etc. You can see the latest posts in the widget to the lower right in the website sidebar – hover your cursor over the images to see their descriptions or click to visit the page. Please contact Kelley directly (kmvoss@gmail.com), or through the Instagram platform, if you’d like your work to be featured, and please follow and share our account!
Thanks to everybody for submitting abstracts for the Heraklion meeting. There was the usual deluge in the last 24 hours before the deadline! The scientific committee has begun the process of reading abstracts and will attempt to contact everyone about abstract acceptance by 15th February.
There is also work going on behind the scenes organising hotels as per your preferences and the organising committee will confirm all this with participants in due course.
A joint meeting between members of the EU COST Action FA1301 ‘CephsInAction’ and the wider CIAC community will take place at the Heraklion Aquarium Crete, March 28th-31st 2017.
The CephsInAction team have kindly offered to take care of registration and abstract submission through their website at cephsinaction.org. You’ll need to register as a user on their site and then just follow the instructions.
The important deadlines are:
Abstract Submission: 31st January 2017
Regular Registration: 15th February (€ 280 / € 160 student)
Late Registration: 10th March (€ 350 / € 200 student)
Note: onsite registration (€ 400 / € 250 student) will be possible during the week of the conference for those who make a last minute decision to attend!
The suggested themes for abstracts are:
– Evolution, Radiation and Adaptation (this may also include contributions from palaeontology/paleobiology)
– Physiology and Adaptation
– Genome, Transcriptome and Functional Genomics
– Reproductive Biology
– Neuroscience: from cells to organisms
– Cognition and Behaviour
– Animal welfare: from the bench to the production and fishery
– Fisheries – Conservation of cephalopods as resource for biosphere and human beings
– Policies and Strategies: impact of regulations and policies on cephalopod research and resources
– Current and future challenges for cephalopod science
– Other Contributions
As you likely know by now, CIAC 2018 will be held in St. Petersburg Florida.
A huge thank you from CIAC to our Japanese colleagues for a truly wonderful conference!
Madoka Sasaki was a brilliant Japanese cephalopod taxonomist who described numerous new species. Today’s workshop gave researchers from across the world the opportunity to examine important type specimens from Sasaki’s collections.
This was also a chance for young researchers new to taxonomy to get some guidance from other members of the research community. Talks by Ian Glendall, CC Lu, Mandy Reid, Giambattista Bello, Jaruwat Nabhitabhata and Kat Bolstad explored a range of topics and taxa.
Cephalopod International Advisory Council 