Proceedings of the 1 st Dresden Meeting on Insect Phylogeny : “ Phylogenetic Relationships within the Insect Orders ” ( Dresden , September 19 – 21 , 2003 )

Recent years have seen remarkable progress in reconstructing the phylogenetic relationships of the Insecta, based on a flood of new morphological and molecular evidence and rapid development of analytical methods. Whereas the relationships among the different ‘orders’ are still far from being robustly resolved, hypotheses about the basal relationships within a number of these ‘orders’ are now approaching maturity. Still, this is true to a very different extent for the various orders, and it does not mean that there are no longer disputes about diametrically conflicting hypotheses. Long-standing questions such as the relationships between Zygoptera and Anisoptera in Odonata, between Caelifera and Ensifera in Orthoptera, and between the four suborders of the Coleoptera are cases in point, as are the position of the Isoptera inside or outside the Blattaria, of the Siphonaptera inside or outside the Mecoptera, and of the Phthiraptera inside or outside the Psocoptera. These basal phylogenetic relationships within the various insect orders were the subject of the meeting the proceedings of which are here presented – a subject that would be laborious to comprehensively access through a search of the literature. The meeting, which took place in the ‘Blockhaus’ in the historical center of Dresden immediately after the annual meeting of the German ‘Society for Biological Systematics’ (GfBS), was designed and organized by Klaus-Dieter Klass, with much support from Matthias Nuss and Niels Peder Kristensen. In 35 invited talks, 55 speakers (including coauthors) who have been deeply involved in research on the basal phylogenetic relationships of the individual insect ‘orders’ presented the state-of-the-art in their fields; many of them included yet unpublished results from their laboratories. The program also included the recently (in 2002) discovered order Mantophasmatodea, which up to now has grown to include 13 described species, rendering it worthwhile to discuss its intraordinal phylogeny. Unfortunately, on the other hand, both of the announced talks on Odonata had to be cancelled briefly before the meeting; still, a written contribution on Odonata phylogeny by Günter Bechly could be included in these proceedings. In the talks, evidence from both the morphological and the molecular field was included according to the availability of data, and partly results from the two fields were presented in separate talks by speakers specialized on the evaluation of the one or the other kind of data; conflicts between different data sets were indicated; and it was explained which phylogenetic hypothesis is presently considered to have the strongest support. A particularly impressive aspect was that due to the rapid development of sequencing and analytical methods for some insect orders molecular data sets are meanwhile available that include hundreds of species. In contrast, in some other orders, such as Archaeognatha and Zygentoma, the compilation of molecular data sets is still at a very early stage; and it became also clear that in a number of insect orders there is still a very limited knowledge of morphological data. Speakers came on their own expenses from various institutions in Germany, Austria, Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, Czechia, Italy, the USA, Australia, Singapore, and Argentina. Including the ca. 50 additional visitors, the meeting was altogether attended by about 100 persons. A volume presenting the current state of understanding of the basal splitting events in the various insect orders is planned for completion within the next two years (editors: Rudolf Meier, Klaus-Dieter Klass, Niels-Peder Kristensen & Michael Whiting). The team of authors preparing the book chapters is largely congruent with the group of speakers invited to present a talk at the meeting. Motivated by the great success of this meeting, the organizers are intending to arrange similar meetings on high-rank insect phylogeny in Dresden that should take place every second year. Focal issues of the meeting scheduled for September 2005 should be: (1) morphological und molecular character systems that are particularly relevant in analysing the relationships among the insect orders; (2) the different and partly competing methods used in the analysis of molecular data; and (3) the results of the working groups that have conducted comprehensive analyses on the relationships among the insect orders. © Museum für Tierkunde Dresden, ISSN 0373-8981, 10.12. 2003 : 119–172