Welcome by Professor Giovanni Pilato

Dear Friends, I am very glad to have you in Catania for our Tenth International Symposium and to see again some old friends, some of whom I first met at the first Symposium in Pallanza (more than thirty years ago), and I am glad to see many young colleagues who have chosen to study such an interesting animal group and who represent the future of tardigrade research (even if old men like me have no intention of retiring just yet). I have seen with great satisfaction the flourishing of diversified research: Morphology, Systematics, Ecology, Biology, new Methodologies, especially the extraordinary property of cryptobiosis, are studied by many tardigradologists, and the molecular surveys are no longer sporadic.