Meeting Report: 8th International Symposium on Testate Amoebae, Ilhabela, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 12-14 September 2016

THE growing importance of these microbial eukaryotes in protistological research may be gauged by the international meetings held on this particular subject in the last 10 years: ISTA4 (2006) in Antwerp, Belgium (Warner and Beyens 2007); ISTA5 (2009) in Montbeliard, France (Mitchell and Gilbert 2010); ISTA6 (2012) in Xiamen, China; ISTA7 (2014) in Poznan, Poland (Lamentowicz et al. 2014). Following the Polish meeting, ISTA came for the first time to the American continent as well as the Southern hemisphere: ISTA8 was held in the Brazilian town of Ilhabela during 12-14 September 2016, consisting of 3 days of presentations, discussions and a small trip to the native rain forest, one of the last remnants of the Mata Atlantica biome still existing on this tropical island, off the coast of Sao Paulo State. There were 39 participants, from 10 countries, from which 65% were students (from undergraduate to PhD) thus illustrating the recent development of the field of research. Also noteworthy was the expansion of the research fields, spanning from phylogenomics to biogeography and palaeontology. While the initial meetings in the 2000s focused still mainly on palaeoecology and bioindication, the modern ones tend to address a wider panel of topics and cover most of the important research interests in organismal biology. Indeed, the future of testate amoebae research seems to be bright, as the meeting was teeming with new ideas and research direction that will further expand the field. The meeting was organized by the Laboratory of Evolutionary Protistology headed by Daniel J. G. Lahr, University of Sao Paulo with the help of the Sociedade Brasileira de Protozoologia (SBPz). The book of abstracts is available on the ISTAR website (http://istar.wikidot.com/meetings). The conference was divided by subject fields: Taxonomy, Palaeontology, Ecology and General Biology. Daniel J. G. Lahr and Enrique Lara composed the scientific committee.