Dear members of the Zoological Society of Japan,

The 91st Annual Meeting of the Zoological Society of Japan in 2020 was originally scheduled to be hosted by the Chugoku-Shikoku Branch and held from September 3 to 5 at the Yonago Convention Center. However, from the perspective of preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus infection that began spreading worldwide at the beginning of 2020, repeated discussions among the meeting-related personnel, including the Yonago Meeting Organizing Committee, and the Board of Directors led to the conclusion that the academic meeting in Yonago had to be postponed by one year. As a result, it was decided that the 2020 fiscal year would feature the first online meeting in the history of the society, led by the society headquarters, with a scale reduced to half of the usual duration—totaling 1.5 days from all day on Friday, September 4 to half a day on Saturday, September 5—and registration for the online meeting was reopened on June 1.

This online tournament was generally held in the following manner.

• • Hold three open-call symposium sessions in Zoom Webinar format, and two related meetings in standard Zoom Meeting format.
  • General presentations will be held in an online poster format using the LINC Biz system.
  • HQ planned events: General meeting, award ceremonies for various awards, award winner lectures (Society Award and Encouragement Award), and HQ planned symposium (lectures by three Myohara Research Grant recipients) will be held in Zoom Webinar format.

In particular, for general presentations, we made the presentation format as flexible as possible to reduce the burden on presenters while creating opportunities for discussion using features such as chat. At the same time, we would like to thank all presenters for creating extremely easy-to-understand posters through the creative use of diagrams and videos. Thanks to the efforts on both sides, we believe we were able to create a somewhat interactive discussion environment rather than a one-way presentation. In addition to the presentations, we opened Zoom breakout rooms on the evening of the first day of the conference and also held an online social gathering using Remo—how was that experience? Meanwhile, in light of the reality that high schools nationwide are facing major impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic and struggling greatly just to conduct classes and school events, we decided to omit high school presentations. The organizing committee for the online conference was hastily formed through repeated online discussions using LINC Biz system chat, Zoom, and other tools, centered around the Society's Executive Secretary and with the participation of members of the IT Committee, with the President of the Society serving concurrently as the Conference Chair. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to everyone: those who hurriedly worked as members of the organizing committee, the organizers of symposia and related meetings who cooperated in holding the online conference on the day of the event, the student assistants and staff who helped facilitate the online conference on the day, and above all, the Yonago Conference Organizing Committee members and others who had advanced the conference preparations up to this point, particularly regarding the symposia.

In this way, we somehow managed to launch the online conference, and the total number of participants during the event reached 711: 333 regular members, 341 student members, 29 non-members, 4 invited speakers, and 4 student assistants. Given that a regular conference usually has around 1,000 participants, far more people attended than the headquarters and organizing committee had anticipated. This renewed my admiration for the vitality of the Zoological Society. At the same time, although it had to take the form of an online conference, I felt from the bottom of my heart that it was truly wonderful to have been able to hold the Zoological Society conference even amidst such social circumstances.

We asked participants to fill out a survey regarding this online conference on the second day of the event, and we expect to be able to share the analysis results with society members in some form in the near future. It seems that the symposiums, related meetings, headquarters-planned sessions, and general presentations all concluded successfully without any major online-related troubles that we had initially feared. Furthermore, based on the feedback we have heard from participants, regarding the question-and-answer sessions—whose effectiveness in an online format was a concern for general presentations, the most crucial part of the conference—we feel that quite active discussions were exchanged through chats both during and outside the core time, as well as via online meetings between presenters and questioners. Of course, there is much room for improvement, but we believe that this first-time experience can serve as a useful reference for organizing Zoological Society conferences in the post-COVID era.

I believe that this was all the result of the passion and efforts of the members and participants of the Zoological Society toward the society's activities, and I would like to express my gratitude once again. I sincerely hope that the current COVID-19 pandemic situation will gradually move toward resolution, and that next year's conference can be held in Yonago with all the members gathered together.

Yoshitaka Oka, Representative of the 91st Online Convention Executive Committee and Former President of the Zoological Society of Japan

PostscriptThe information regarding the number of presentation titles was omitted, so it has been added for the record (IT Committee, July 29, 2021).
Headquarters-planned symposium (1st Mariko Myohara Research Encouragement Grant Commemorative Symposium): 3 presentations, open-call symposia: 16 presentations (3 sessions), related meetings: 5 presentations (2 sessions), online poster presentations: 252 presentations, elementary, junior high, and high school student poster presentations (canceled)