The diets of juvenile (<g0 mm) Syngnathus scovelli and of H~ppocampus zosterae, abundant members of a resident fish community in a Thalassia testudnum seagrass bed in Tampa Bay, Florida, were examined from Apnl to October 1984. Harpacticoid copepods comprised most of the diet, both in terms of percent number and percent biomass, for the smaller size classes of S. scovelli and for H. zosterae, a...

Eyewitness reports and cultural representations have been interpreted by some researchers to suggest the existence of a large, long-bodied marine vertebrate in the northeast Pacifi c. Dubbed “Caddy” or “Cadborosaurus” (after Cadboro Bay, British Columbia), it was formally named and described as Cadborosaurus willsi by Bousfi eld and LeBlond in 1995. Among the supposedly most informative account...

Evolutionary studies have revealed that reproductive proteins in animals and plants often evolve more rapidly than the genome-wide average. The causes of this pattern, which may include relaxed purifying selection, sexual selection, sexual conflict, pathogen resistance, reinforcement, or gene duplication, remain elusive. Investigative expansions to additional taxa and reproductive tissues have ...

Despite their importance as evolutionary and ecological model systems, the phylogenetic relationships among gasterosteiforms remain poorly understood, complicating efforts to understand the evolutionary origins of the exceptional morphological and behavioural diversity of this group. The present review summarizes current knowledge on the origin and evolution of syngnathids, a gasterosteiform fa...

Understanding how selection acts on traits individually and in combination is an important step in deciphering the mechanisms driving evolutionary change, but for most species, and especially those in which sexual selection acts more strongly on females than on males, we have no estimates of selection coefficients pertaining to the multivariate sexually selected phenotype. Here, we use a labora...

Because of their modified cranial morphology, syngnathid pipefishes have been described as extreme suction feeders. The presumption is that these fishes use their elongate snout much like a pipette in capturing planktonic prey. In this study, we quantify the contribution of suction to the feeding strike and quantitatively describe the prey capture mechanics of the bay pipefish Syngnathus leptor...

*Departamento de Zoologia e Antropologia da Faculdade de Cie“ ncias da Universidade do Porto, Prac a GomesTeixeira, 4099-002 Porto, Portugal. CIIMAR, Rua dos Bragas 177, 4050-123 Porto, Portugal. Faculdade de Cie“ ncias da Sau¤ de da Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Rua Carlos da Maia 296, 4200-150 Porto, Portugal. ISPA, Rua Jardim doTabaco 34, 1149-041 Lisboa, Portugal. Corresponding author, e-ma...

In the dusky pipefish Syngnathus floridae, like other species in the family Syngnathidae, 'pregnant' males provide all post-zygotic care. Male pregnancy has interesting implications for sexual selection theory and the evolution of mating systems. Here, we employ microsatellite markers to describe the genetic mating system of S. floridae, compare the outcome with a previous report of genetic pol...

Nucleobase and nucleoside compounds exist widely in various organisms. An often occurring problem in the discovery of new bioactive compounds from natural products is reisolation of known nucleobase and nucleoside compounds. To resolve this problem, a capillary electrophoresis-high resolution mass spectrometry (CE-HR-MS) method providing both rapid separation and accurate mass full-scan MS data...