Wonderful Worms around the World: Celebrating International Polychaete Day

Today is International Polychaete Day! On this day, we celebrate polychaetes for their extraordinary diversity, beauty, and the important role they play in marine and estuarine communities.

Since 2015, the world has been celebrating International Polychaete Day on the 1st of July. This date was chosen to honour Dr Kristian Fauchald (1935-2015) whose birthday fell on this date. Dr Fauchald was the former Polychaete Curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., USA. Dr Fauchald was an influential researcher who dedicated over 60 years to studies on polychaetes and made important contributions to our understanding of their biology, ecology, reproduction, and phylogeny. He visited Australia multiple times and spent several months working on Australian polychaetes at the Australian Museum.

Dr Fauchald attended the very first International Polychaete Conference held in August 1983 at the Australian Museum. This conference attracted 95 participants from 16 countries and included a local field trip and a two-week field trip to Lizard Island Research Station. For many researchers, this was the first time they had a chance to put "faces" to the names they had only seen in publications (keep in mind, this was before the internet!). In his plenary talk, Dr Fauchald raised the issue of ‘cosmopolitan’ species – at the time, it was widely accepted that polychaetes were unusual animals as they often had wide distributions. Now most ‘cosmopolitan’ species have been found to include suites of distinct species in different parts of the world.

As a testament to the success of the 1983 conference and the need for such meetings, polychaete conferences have been held every three years around the world in Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Spain, UK, and USA. The papers presented at these conferences have been published in dedicated proceedings. After 30 years, the 11th International Polychaete Conference returned to the Australian Museum in 2013. Once again, it included a two-week field trip to Lizard Island Research Station, which resulted in a significant dedicated volume of Zootaxa where 91 new species were described. Dr Fauchald attended every meeting until his passing in 2015 and was an active and enthusiastic supporter of these conferences. In 1995, at the 5th meeting in Qingdao, China we even celebrated his birthday and managed to find a birthday cake!

We are about to participate in the 14th conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa in July 2023, 40 years since the first one at the Australian Museum. These conferences have provided a tremendous opportunity for collaboration and a transfer of knowledge from established researchers to the next generation of scientists.

Today, we are very proud to celebrate International Polychaete Day and to honour Dr Fauchald who was a great scientist, a valued mentor, and a friend for so many of us.