Experimental designs for testing differences in survival among salmonid populations

The Yakima Fisheries Project (YFP) is a supplementation plan for enhancing salmon runs in the Yakima River basin. It is presumed that inadequate spawning and rearing, habitat are limiting, factors to population abundance of spring chinook salmon. Therefore, the supplementation effort for spring chinook salmon is focused on introducing hatchery-raised smolts into the basin to compensate for the lack of spawning habitat. However, based on empirical evidence in the Yakima basin, hatchery-reared salmon have survived poorly compared to wild salmon. Therefore, the YFP has proposed to alter the optimal conventional treatment (OCT), which is the state-of-the-art hatchery rearing method, to a new innovative treatment (NIT). The NIT is intended to produce hatchery fish that mimic wild fish and thereby to enhance their survival over that of OCT fish. A limited application of the NIT (LNIT) has also been proposed to reduce the cost of applying the new treatment, yet retain the benefits of increased survival. This research was conducted to test whether the uncertainty using the experimental design was within the limits specified by the Planning Status Report (PSR)

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Hobbseus yalobushensis, a new crawfish from central Mississippi (Decapoda: Cambaridae)

Volume: 102Start Page: 637End Page: 64