Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Tardigrada

The Tenth International Symposium on Tardigrada took place in Catania, Italy from 18 to 23 June 2006. There were seventy-one participants at the Symposium, representing fourteen countries. The Symposium provided an unique opportunity both to review the progress in the tardigrade studies and to allow all delegates to meet and to discuss topics of common interest. The symposium included thirty-four lectures and thirty-one poster presentations on a wide variety of topics on tardigrade biology. Topics included systematics, morphological and molecular phylogeny, faunal studies, biogeography, ecology, survival strategies, and modern molecular methodologies in tardigrade research. The twenty-four papers appearing in the this special issue of the Journal of Limnology represent most of the contributors present in Catania. The Symposium offered an interesting Round Table on the systematic criteria of Tardigrada, and the opportunity to examine and to compare type materials from several tardigrade collections: Pilato and Binda’s collection, Bertolani’s collection and, thanks to the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Verona, Ramazzotti’s collection, Maucci’s collection and Biserov’s collection. Moreover, many tardigradologists have contributed bringing their material.