I enjoyed attending the 2019 Aquatic Sciences meeting in sunny Puerto Rico last week. And it wasn’t just for the surf and sun (though that was nice to for this Canadian from the land of snow and ice-covered lakes!). There were lots of interesting sessions for me ranging from recent developments in remote sensing of lakes (especially chlorophyll, cyanobacteria blooms and ice cover, as detected from satellites) to a great session on planktonic mixotrophs and their neglected role in aquatic food webs and biodiversity maintenance.

Together with my postdoc (Vincent Fugère), we hosted a session on “Adaptation of Aquatic Biodiversity to Global Change” with some great talks by Mark Urban on eco-evolutionary shifts in pond food webs with climate change, by Hans Dam’s lab on copepod adaptation to warming, and by David Post on how dams have influenced fish eco-evolution. Elias Oziolor and Lauren Schiebelhut presented really interesting talks on evolutionary rescue-type events in nature in response to extreme disturbances and Gregor Fussmann, Vincent Fugère and I talked about experimental tests of evolutionary (community) rescue. Other really neat studies relating climate change to rarety of species (Piero Calosi) and on lake food webs based on change in fish behaviour (Timothy Bartley with Kevin McCann and Bailey McMeans). The session was well wrapped up by Susana Agusti’s group discussing fast adaptation in diatoms to climate warming and by Ursula Gaedke who presented on how trade-offs of trait adaptation can influence lake plankton food web functioning.

Overall a very interesting meeting – I learned a lot and reconnected with a lot of colleagues. Hard to ask for more!