2025 Annual Meeting
Golden, Colorado
15-18 June 2025
Epilogue on the 2025 Meeting:
By the numbers: ~170 attended, including 16 single-day attendees from the local arachnophile community and about a dozen meeting volunteers from Paula Cushing’s lab. The meating featured two plenary presentations, 67 oral presentations (including a genomics symposium), and 40 poster presentations. A pre-meeting hands-on workshop on Linyphiidae identification had 25 participants.
Student Presentation Awards winners:
Oral winner: Benjamin Klementz for “Discovering the developmental genetic mechanisms underlying appendage innovations in chelicerates.”
Oral runner-up: Colton Herzog for “Multi-elemental nutrient cycles driven by predator diet across multiple prey types.”
Poster winner: Patrick Casto for “Investigation of behavioral patterns during olfactory-guided homing behavior in the amblypygid Phrynus marginemaculatus.”
Poster runner-up: Lin Yan for “Heterospecific mate choice reveals hidden and variable female preferences in the Habronattus clypeatus group of jumping spiders.”
Plenary presentations:
Jessica Garb: “Genomic explorations of silk production across the spider tree of life.”
Rodrigo Monjarez-Ruedas (2024 Platnick Award Winner): “High differentiation and endemism in the California mountains: Population genomics and spatial phylogenetics of mygalomorph spiders.”
Genomics symposium: with presentations by Seira Ashley Adams, Jesús A. Ballesteros, Sandra M Correa-Garhwal, Jacob A. Gorneau, Calvin Runnels, Carlos E. Santibáñez-López, Emily V. W. Setton and Prashant P. Sharma.
Host and planning committee members:: Paula Cushing, Jason Bond, Andy Roberts, Nina Sandlin.
Logistics organizer: Colleen Carter with coppercreekpartners.com.
Thanks to:
Scientific Program Committee: Marshal Hedin, San Diego State University, Damian O. Elias, University of California – Berkeley, Eileen Hebets, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Travel Grant Committee: Sarah Stellwagen and Tyler Brown, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Marc Milne, University of Indianapolis
Research Grant Committee chair: Matthew R. Graham, Eastern Connecticut State University
Student Competition Committee chair: Jason E. Bond, University of California – Davis, and to colleagues serving as judges for the student awards.
AAS website manager: Nina Sandlin, Field Museum of Natural History
Thanks also to officers of the AAS for their assistance.
Thanks to the volunteers who assisted with the meeting: Alexandra Austin, Mark Christopher, Beth Fisher, Fran Fraser, Jess Garrett, Hazel Gordon, Karen Hall, Greg Holling, Ryan Jones, Kristi Kass, Jason Lucas, Max Moran, Carol and Malachi Reed, Sarah Schatsiek, Phyllis Sharp, Goran Shikak, Kelly Staudenmier, Rick Teichler, Kotomi Yoshida, Meg Zajkowski.
Meeting Group Photo
Thank you to our meeting donors
The AAS is grateful to a number of donors and foundations and organizations for providing generous support for this meeting:
the Denver Museum of Nature of Sciences, Kenneth King Foundation, Butterfly Pavilion, City of La Junta, and PhD Properties, LLC.
Several individual donors also provided support: Vincent Aquino, Jason Bond, Richard Bradley, Paula Cushing, Ryan Jones, Linda LaRocque, Chris Malloy, Peter Midford, Marc Milne, Kenny Prestwich, Rickie Rosen, and Andrew Taylor.
