A one day symposium entitled Palynostratigraphy of Low Latitudes was held on November 18th, 1997, in Isla Margarita, Venezuela. The symposium was put on in conjunction with the joint 8th Venezuelan Geological Congress and the 1st Latin American Sedimentological Congress. Symposium organizers Laurent de Verteuil (Petrotrin, Trinidad) and Geoffrey Norris (University of Toronto, Canada) put together a solid program of twelve oral papers (excluding cancellations) and one keynote lecture.

Maria Antoinetta Lorente (Maraven) led off the sessions with an invited paper on the historical development of palynology in Venezuela. Lorente's well conceived presentation outlined the development of the different laboratories and the training of local palynologists, against the economic backdrop of boom and bust cycles and major restructuring in the Venezuelan oil industry. Younger heads particularly enjoyed the archive photos of Dutch palynological legends at work in early Bataafse/Shell laboratories. This historical paper was most appropriate as the symposium marked the celebration of 50 years of industrial palynology in Venezuela. This event was further commemorated during the symposium by an awards ceremony recognizing the Mentors of Palynology in Venezuela. During the ceremony there were not a few clearly heartfelt moments, as for example, when the current generation of palynologists presented service awards to retired veteran technicians, whom no doubt first introduced them to hydrofluoric acid and laboratory technique.

Other contributions almost entirely comprised applied palynostratigraphy, with an understandable over-representation of Latin American case studies. In his keynote address, however, Mark Bush (Florida Institute of Technology) showcased modern pollen rain data and lake spectra from lowland Amazonia, Equador, Costa Rica and Panama, to explore long-held assumptions about neotropical palynology. For example, the dogma of anemophilous dominated homogeneity of pollen spectra from varied tropical lowland forests can be rejected; entomophilous taxa comprise over 50% of several measured spectra and show clear affinities with source vegetation. Also, flower morphology and pollination syndrome are important characters in determining the representation of a taxon in the pollen rain. Other data indicate that cooling, rather than drying, was the primary variable driving Pleistocene floral changes in the Amazon basin. That is, lowland rainforests there did not retreat into river valley "refugia" surrounded by grassy savanna-woodlands, as has been widely hypothesized by vicariance biogeographers. In an abstract that was unfortunately not ultimately presented, Marcel Carvalho (Universitat Heidelberg) found support, in three Plio-Pleistocene wells from Foz do Amazonas Basin, for the idea of limited savanna development during glacial intervals. Such data and ideas should directly impact the sequence interpretations made by palynologists working tropical Neogene basins, and represent an important ecological direction for invigoration in industry palynostratigraphy.

Stratigraphic palynologists working with low latitude assemblages have, since the classic Orinoco work by Muller (1956) and development of the method by Van der Hammen and co-workers, long used relative abundance of key pollen types to infer depositional environments and delineate cycles of sedimentation. The development of sequence stratigraphy and genetic basin analysis has provided a welcome paradigm for further taphonomic and paleoecological interpretation of such palynological assemblages. This new focus was evident in many of the symposium contributions. At the regional scale, Valenti Rule (Maraven) and Claude Poumot (Elf) showed how the Palynocycle approach developed by Elf for the Neogene of South-East Asia might be applied to delineate Eocene-Miocene sequences in Western Venezuela. This approach is entirely different from that used to the same end by Rule in Palynology 21, and it would be interesting to compare the results where/if they overlap. At the field/ reservoir scale, Josefa Carbon and Omar Colmenares (Intevep) presented an elegant integration of palynomorph and palynofacies data sets with electric log and sedimentological data from cores, that allowed them to characterize marginal and shallow marine environments in the Eastern Venezuelan Basin. Dave Shaw (Epoca) showed some results from an integrated study of upper Neogene Trinidad outcrops which incorporated data from hand-held gamma ray logs, paleontology and standard field techniques, into a genetic sequence interpretation. Other papers pursued this theme and new interpretations of some old stratigraphy engendered a certain amount of brisk comment from the floor. Carlos Jaramillo (University of Florida), for example, showed fighting form in defense of his dissertation views concerning the age of parts of the Mirador Formation in Columbia.

Speaking of stratigraphic age, Sue de Villiers and Ann Cadman (University of the Witwatersrand) presented results of an intriguing study of correlative angiosperm assemblages from two localities in South Africa, one of which may be credibly dated to middle Eocene on the basis of planktonic foraminifers. What is intriguing is that both assemblages contain pollen attributable to the Compositae, in particular, Mutisia-type pollen and high-spined Tubulifloridites antipodica. If substantiated, these records may represent the oldest for the family and will have thought-provoking biogeographic implications.

Dinocysts are under-represented in the Tertiary deltaic systems that are hydrocarbon prospective in Columbia, Venezuela and Trinidad, and this accounts for the emphasis on pollen results in most of the symposium contributions. The infectious protists were effectively showcased, however, in two papers, both treating the Cretaceous. Roel Verreusel (LPP Foundation) presented the framework of a dinocyst based zonation being used by Shell in Gabon, and Matsuru Arai (Petrobras) demonstrated latitudinal provincialism and Aptian through Senonian assemblage turnover in Brazilian basins.

The Margarita Hilton and surrounding beaches and cafes in Porlamar provided a perfect setting for the low lat enthusiasts in attendance to talk shop and swap HF stories over beers and lobster (I did not know that in Columbia HF is a blackmarket commodity). The organizing committee of the conference are to be commended for their choice of location and Geoff and I again thank all those who presented papers and attended the symposium. The full list of titles for the papers presented follows:

Maria A. Lorente. The history of palynology in Venezuela

Keynote Address: Mark B. Bush, Paul A. Colinvaux and Robert Rivera. Pleistocene refugia reconsidered: Modern and fossil pollen evidence Marcel A. Carvalho. Paleoecological and paleoclimatic studies based on palynology of Pliocene and Pleistocene sediments from the Foz Do Amazonas Basin.

Dave Shaw. The application of palynology to the interpretation of sequence stratigraphy and paleoenvironments in the Neogene of Trinidad

Francisca Oboh-Ikuenobe, Alan P. Hoffmeister and R. Christfield. Patterns of palynomorph and palynofacies distribution in upper Oligocene to lower Miocene sediments in the Cote D'Ivoire-Ghana transform margin

Sharma L. Gaponoff. High resolution paleoenvironmental interpretations of Eocene through Miocene core and sidewall core samples from the Eastern Venezuelan Basin, Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt

Valent Rull and Claude Poumot. Eocene to Miocene palynocycles of Western Venezuela

Carlos Jaramillo and David Dilcher. Middle Paleogene palynology of La Pinalerita section, Llanos foothills, Colombia: Biostratigraphic and sequence stratigraphic implications

Josefa Carbon and Omar Colmenares. Estudio de los paleoambientes de sedimentacion del Mioceno de la cuenca Oriental: Caracterizacion de los conjuntos de palinomorfos y palinofacies

Mitsuru Arai, Jose Botelho Neto, Cecilia Cunha Lana and Elizabete Pedrao Low latitude palynology from Brazilian marine

Roel M. C. H. Verreussel, Ronald E. Besems and Michel G. Gaillard. A palynological zonation for the upper Cretaceous of Gabon

Oscar A. Yepes. Campanian-Maastrichtian dinoflagellate biostratigraphy and palynofacies analysis from Los Pinos Formation, Colombia

S. L. Gaponoff. High resolution paleoenvironmental interpretations of low paleolatitude late Albian conventional cores from Kuwait: A palynological approach

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This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 21(1):8-9, 1998.