Huge thanks to the small team who organised this symposium and to all the wonderful speakers for agreeing to celebrate with us the lives of John and Mike, and Frances Murphy. For those who missed it, the uniformly high quality, fascinating talks ranged across diverse topics including the role of women in arachnology (past, present and future), the origins of spiders in the geological record, how to measure spider diversity, revisions of certain genera and higher classifications, and spider phylogeography. Many of the presentations, of course, referred back to the pivotal role played by John and Mike in advancing their areas of arachnology. As icing on the cake, the whole Zoom proceedings went without a single hitch!
All of the talks are available via our YouTube channel. A memorial Festschrift, containing most of the symposium presentations and some additional contributions, will be published as a special edition of Arachnology in the first half of 2022.
Click here for the background to the symposium, the programme and obituaries of John, Mike and Frances.