BACKGROUND AND AIMS The shark fisheries of Madagascar remain largely unstudied. Remoteness makes fisheries monitoring challenging while the high value of shark fins combined with the extreme poverty in Madagascar creates intensive pressure on shark resources. MATERIALS AND METHODS We use DNA barcoding and species-specific PCR assays to characterize shark fisheries in Antongil Bay in northeast...

This paper describes the frequency and number of Sphyrion laevigatum in the skin of Genypterus blacodes, an important economic resource in Chile. The analysis of a spatial distribution model indicated that the parasites tended to cluster. Variations in the number of parasites per host could be described by a negative binomial distribution. The maximum number of parasites observed per host was two.

Many elasmobranchs have experienced strong population declines, which have been largely attributed to the direct and indirect effects of exploitation. Recently, however, live elasmobranchs are being increasingly valued for their role in marine ecosystems, dive tourism and intrinsic worth. Thus, management plans have been implemented to slow and ultimately reverse negative trends, including shar...

Despite a large occurrence, especially over the Pacific Ocean, the chemical diversity of marine invertebrates belonging to the order Zoantharia is largely underexplored. For the two species of the genus Antipathozoanthus no chemical study has been reported so far. The first chemical investigation of Antipathozoanthus hickmani collected at the Marine Protected Area "El Pelado", Santa Elena, Ecua...

There is a growing need to comprehensively understand how messages and online conversations construct and convey meanings especially when they are likely to be distributed across multiple social media platforms. This paper introduces a framework to address this need, the Social Semiotic Multimodal (SSMM) framework based on multimodal extensions to Systemic Functional Linguistics, a semiotic the...

Future service customer-provider as well as inter-provider relationships will see the increased application of dynamic service composition providing a broad diversity of functions. However, currently existing deficiencies of processes and tools force service providers and service consumers to trade off profitability against security compliance. This is predominately due to the ignorance or manu...

The caridean shrimp Ogyrides wickstenae sp. nov. is described from Mazatlán, Pacific coast of Mexico. The new species is most closely related to O. tarazonai Wicksten & Méndez, 1988 and O. hayi Williams, 1981, sharing with them a single spine on the dorsal midline of the carapace. However, the new species can be distinguished from the two allied species by the presence of a single small spine o...

Are pelagic species such as sharks and tuna distributed homogenously or heterogeneously in the oceans? Large assemblages of these species have been observed at seamounts and offshore islands in the eastern tropical Pacific, which are considered hotspots of pelagic biodiversity. Is the species distribution uniform at these hotspots or do species aggregate at a finer spatial scale at these sites?...