Held at the 81st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, July 5 - 10, 2001

The primary purpose of this webpage is to make the contents of the pupfish symposium available to the general public. The idea for this symposium grew out of a conversation between BJT and Astrid Kodric-Brown in the Fall of 2000. As originally conceived, it would have been held in conjunction with a meeting of ASIH, EEEF, SSE or some other professional group in the summer of 2002. In February of this year, for several compelling reasons, the schedule was advanced to 2001. This made it literally impossible to apply for financial support or to arrange for the editing or publishing of a symposium volume in a timely fashion. Therefore we owe the participants, most especially those who traveled a considerable distance, a special thanks. We also thank the organizers of the ASIH meetings at Penn State for accepting our symposium on such short notice.

The isolated pupfish populations of the Great Basin, and especially those of the Death Valley region, have long been an important model system for the analysis of evolutionary divergence, particularly the divergence of morphological features in relatively short time periods. But pupfishes range throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean regions as well, and these areas contain populations that will be increasingly important to the study of insular, glacial relict, and lacustrine divergence. The pupfishes of these regions also include two of the youngest "species flocks" now known among fishes, those of Laguna Chichankanab in the Yucatan, and San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. The papers presented at the symposium reflect this broader geographic focus.

This symposium commemorates the work of the American ichthyologist, Robert Rush Miller. Through a long and distinguished career, Bob Miller has contributed to our knowledge of the systematics and evolutionary biology of many groups of fishes, but his work on pupfishes---his first love and "favorite" group---is seminal. One simply cannot study pupfishes, be they from Death Valley, central Mexico, the Atlantic coast, or the Caribbean, without encountering original papers by Bob Miller and or his students and collaborators. And they are papers that remain significant, and often central, many years after they were first published. We will leave the writing of Bob's complete biography to others, but we have included what we believe to be a complete list of his papers on pupfishes on this page, with the hope that his work on this group might inspire others as it has inspired us. Several of the symposium papers are "minihistories" or "appreciations" of Bob Miller. We are delighted to include these, as well as some photos of "Miller in action."

We thank Bob Liu, Jerry Smith and Clark Hubbs for some of the photographs that appear on this page, and Gwen Williams for technical assistance.

- Bruce Turner (fishgen@vt.edu) and Alice Echelle (aechelle@juno.com), Sept. 2001.