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...

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...

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?...

Age and growth studies for the scalloped hammerhead shark, Sphyrna lewini (Griffith and Smith, 1834) caught along the southern Brazilian coast, were based on ring measurements of vertebrae sections of 115 males, 116 females and 14 unknown sexed sharks between 48 and 344 cm total length (TL). The von Bertalanffy growth models were best fit using back-calculated data. The growth parameters obtain...

  The present studywas carried out to survey ectoparasites fauna of gold fish (Carassius auratus) in Mazandaran province (Iran) from April 2009 to March 2010. A total of 200 samples were obtained from 10 ornamental fish supply centers and transferred alive to the laboratory. In this study, the following ectoparasites were isolated: Ichthyophthirius multifillis , Trichodina spp., Gyrodactyl...