Hydroids of the Pacific Coast of Canada and the United States is an attempt to give a brief description, with figures, of every hydroid species known to occur along the Pacific Coast of Canada and the United States, together with its distribution within this area. It is intended to provide the Pacific zoologist with a reference, easily understood, to every species of hydroid reported from the coast. Keys to families, genera, and species have been included to facilitate diagnosis. Much of the information presented has already been published, but in widely scattered papers, some of them long out of print. The new contribution is largely in the extensive addition to the distribution records, for which many thousands of specimens have been examined.

This volume, the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Coelenterate Biology, is organized as the meeting was around six topics. Because several sessions of ICCB7 constituted the 2003 North American meeting of the International Society for Reef Studies, the subject of coral reefs is strongly represented in the section on Ecology. The other themes are Neurobiology; Reproduction, Development, and Life Cycles; Pioneers in Coelenterate Biology; Cnidae; and Taxonomy and Systematics. Ctenophores, as well as representatives of all four classes of cnidarians are among the study subjects of the research reported in this volume. The theme of variability runs through the volume – be it in cnidae, morphology, behavior, neurobiology, ecology, colony form, or reproduction, variability is a major reason these animals are so interesting and challenging to study! This is a must-read resource for anyone doing research – or planning to do research – on cnidarians and ctenophores.