The information on this page is under review and may no longer be accurate. Griffith web content is reviewed periodically to ensure it remains current. This page has passed its scheduled review date, however the replacement document has not yet been published.
Please contact the staff member responsible for site maintenance for further information. This is an automatically-generated message.
Content below this notice may be out of date.
Three special sessions will be held during the conference. The details of each session are below. Please contact the session organisers directly for further information. In addition, several General Sessions will also be held to accommodate presentations that are relevant to the general theme of the conference but do not fall within any of the special sessions.
Session organiser: Mike Dawson
The origins and richness of gelatinous zooplankton species are long-standing enigma. Conversely, the extinction of biodiversity is a major contemporary concern. These areas of research intersect in studies of jellyfish blooms and invasive species, phenomena that are generally considered antithetical to diversity but which also represent opportunistic experiments in ecology and evolution. Contributions to this session are invited to discuss any aspect of the diversity of jellyfish at any level from molecules to species distributions that increases our understanding of jellyfish blooms. Suitable topics could include, but are not limited to, the origins, evolution, maintenance, and extinction of diversity at any level from populations to higher taxa, using molecular, physiological, morphological, ecological, life-history, or distributional data. Contemporary processes, such as range expansions and species invasions, may be investigated as phenomena in their own right and/or as potential analogues of evolutionary processes that influence diversity over geological time. Comparative and integrative studies are encouraged.
Plenary speaker: Professor Bill Hamner
Session organiser: Kylie Pitt
Jellyfish are renowned as being voracious planktivores and blooms of jellyfish have been implicated in radically altering pelagic food webs. Increasingly, however, jellyfish are also being recognised as providing an important source of food for a variety of predators such as other gelatinous zooplankton and fish. Understanding the trophic ecology of jellyfish is paramount for determining the impacts of blooms on pelagic food webs. Suitable topics could include impacts of jellyfish on planktonic communities, jellyfish as prey, interactions between jellyfish and fisheries, the use of novel tracers to elucidate diet and comparisons of the predatory impact of zooxanthellate and azooxanthellate medusae.
Plenary speaker: Dr Jenny Purcell
Session organiser: Gerhard Jams
Jellyfish blooms are often spectacular events at coastlines throughout the world. The ecological and economic impacts of jellyfish blooms are enormous and attempts are often made to link blooms with climate change and pollution. Previous conferences on jellyfish blooms have mainly concentrated on the striking medusoid generation but the long-lived polypoid generation may play a key role in determining if and when blooms occur. To understand the mechanisms behind population blooms it is critical that the ecology of the benthic polyps be investigated. Suitable topics in this session could include, but are not limited to, substrate choice and settlement of planulae, factors regulating the occurrence of polyps, recruitment of polyp populations, asexual propagation of polyps, predation and competition in benthic communities, and life cycles and their environmental adaptations.
Plenary speaker: Dr Gerhard Jams
Session organiser: Kylie Pitt and Jamie Seymour
In this session we invite presentations from all other areas of jellyfish research that relate to the general theme of “jellyfish blooms”. These may include other areas of biological and ecological research (e.g. life histories, reproductive biology, physiology, movement), medical aspects, societal and industrial impacts of blooms and jellyfish fisheries.