A robust food web is one in which few secondary extinctions occur after removing species. We investigated how parasites affected the robustness of the Carpinteria Salt Marsh food web by conducting random species removals and a hypothetical, but plausible, species invasion. Parasites were much more likely than free-living species to suffer secondary extinctions following the removal of a free-li...

—We describe a new species of Luperosaurus from the Luzon faunal region, northern Philippines. The new species is most similar to, and has long been confused with, Luperosaurus cumingii from Luzon Island but differs from this and all other Luperosaurus by numerous characters of scalation, color pattern, and a suite of variables related to its small body size. The new species has been recorded a...

The Asiatic species of Oleandra (Oleandraceae) are revised. We reduce a large number of species to Oleandra neriiformis and Oleandra sibbaldii, we provide a revised circumscription of Oleandra cumingii and Oleandra undulata and we establish the identity of Oleandra vulpina. In total, we recognize 9 species, with full synonymy, descriptions and distribution maps. A list of identifications is app...

We examined structural changes in the molluscan community for ten years (2001-2010) before and five years (2011-2015) after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami around Matsushima Bay, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Before the earthquake and tsunami, Ruditapes philippinarum, Macoma incongrua, Pillucina pisidium, and Batillaria cumingii were dominant, and an alien p...

In eastern Asia and western North America at least nine morphologically distinguishable species of digenean trematode infect the mud snail, Batillaria attramentaria (Sowerby 1855) (=B. cumingi (Crosse 1862)), as first intermediate host. Further, molecular and morphological evidence indicates that several of these trematode species comprise complexes of cryptic species. I present an identificati...

Cyclophilin D (referred to as HsCypD) was obtained from the freshwater pearl mussel (Hyriopsis schlegelii). The full-length cDNA was 2 671 bp, encoding a protein consisting of 367 amino acids. HsCypD was determined to be a hydrophilic intracellular protein with 10 phosphorylation sites and four tetratricopeptide repeat (TPR) domains, but no signal peptide. The core sequence region YKGCIFHRIIKDF...