Theo C.M. Bakker, PhD

In 1985, International Conferences on Stickleback Behavior and Evolution started. The first was organized in Leiden (actually Sassenheim near Leiden) by Piet Sevenster and Hans van den Assem to commemorate 50 years of behavioral research on sticklebacks, 1934 introduced by Niko Tinbergen in Leiden, and to honor Jan van Iersel, who 1984 retired as a professor of Ethology at the University of Leiden. The first two conferences actually had been named International Symposium on Stickleback Behaviour; thus there has been a shift from stickleback behavior to stickleback evolution over the last decades.

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There have been ten conferences thus far. Selected papers from the first nine of these conferences have been published in Behaviour (the first five conferences), the Journal of Fish Biology (the sixth conference), and Evolutionary Ecology Research (the last three conferences). The Editorials to these special issues can be downloaded below (click on image).