By Lucas Eckert, PhD Candidate at McGill University

Can you believe they have a whole conference just for some random species of fish? Well, you better believe it, because I was there. In fact, this wasn’t even the first time it happened – this was the 11^th International Congress on Stickleback Behaviour and Evolution – and I’ll tell you all about it.

Of course, stickleback (threespine, to be exact) are not just some random species of fish. In the past 50 years or so, stickleback have become a model system in evolutionary biology. This is largely due to their unique evolutionary history and their propensity to colonize new environments, which has led to striking patterns of evolutionary divergence. And for the kinds of questions that I’m interested in – the predictability of adaptation, the mechanisms that promote phenotypic diversity, the factors that lead to speciation – stickleback are just the perfect little fish.

Every three years, the research community organizes a conference to get everyone in the same room and talking stickleback. This year, the conference was organized by Andrew Hendry (McGill), Katie Peichel (Bern), Sean Rogers (Calgary), Rana El-Sabaawi (Victoria) and Dan Bolnick (Connecticut) and was to be held at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Andrew asked if I wanted to be involved as the head of the student organizing committee and I couldn’t say no to such an honour.

Bamfield is a small coastal community on lands belonging to the Huu-ay-aht First Nations, just north of Pacific Rim National Park. It is also home to a field station that has been operating for over 50 years, facilitating research and hosting numerous field courses every year. Interestingly, they had never hosted a real conference at the field station, until this year. Sean Rogers is the current director at Bamfield, and an avid stickleback researcher himself, so luckily, we had an inside man to help set this up. I really can’t emphasize enough how amazing it was to have our conference at this location. The scenery was obviously stunning, we got to go out on hikes and boat outings and see some amazing wildlife, and we even got to go catch some stickleback. It was also very fitting as British Columbia was host to much of the seminal work on stickleback evolution, thanks to the likes of Don McPhail, Tom Reimchen, Dolph Schluter, and others, many of whom attended the meeting.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the virtues of having a rather small yet focused conference. There were ~100 attendees, which was the perfect number of people to meet plenty of folks without being overwhelmed. It also meant that you could just have a single session and wouldn’t have to run between rooms or miss people’s talks. The quality of the talks was exceptional, and the content was uniformly fascinating (though I may be biased). We also had some incredible plenary speakers and a very insightful set of talks from some of the pioneers in the field who got to reflect on their journeys and the state of the current research landscape. While large conferences like Evolution or the Ecological Society of America have their virtues as well, it’s hard to imagine beating the format of this meeting. Certainly, this was the most rewarding conference I’ve attended, a sentiment which was echoed by many attendees, even those who have surely attended countless conferences.

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to have attended and helped plan Stickleback 2025. And I’m incredibly grateful to all the other faculty and student organizers and the staff at Bamfield for making it happen and making it so special. It’s surely not an experience I’ll forget anytime soon. There’s lots more to tell, including a tsunami alert and a late night encounter with bioluminescent plankton, but those are stories for another time.