Introduction to the Symposium: Larval Forms

The following comments were given by Alan Kohn as an introduction to ‘‘Evolutionary Paths Among Developmental Possibilities: A Symposium Marking the Contributions and Influence of Richard Strathmann’’ on January 4, 2010, at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle. Alan’s introduction in verse helps to link the symposium to a long and rich history of poetry in the study of marine larvae, going back to Walter Garstang (Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford), a late 19th century pioneer in the study of the biology of larvae and author of the posthumous ‘‘Larval Forms with Other Zoological Verses’’ (Garstang 1962; all quotes within the present poem are from this source). Richard Strathmann has made some of his own published contributions to this rhyming tradition (Strathmann and Eernisse 1994), and poetry readings have been an important part of many of Richard’s courses at the Friday Harbor Laboratories. Alan (who was Richard’s PhD advisor) generously offered his poem as a preface to the published symposium articles that follow. Like Garstang’s verse, Alan’s can be read for word play, historical context, and scientific commentary. We hope it will also be read as a poetic expression of gratitude from the diverse larval forms that Richard reared and mentored over the years.