Seasonal foods, gonadal maturation, and length-weight relationships for nine fishes commonly captured by shrimp trawl on the Northwest Gulf of Mexico Continental Shelf

Recent emphasis on ecosystem approaches to fisheries management renews interest in, and the need for, trophic information about fish communities. A program was started in 1980 at the National Marine Fisheries Service Galveston Laboratory to develop a trophic database for continental shelf fishes. Collections were made during 1982-1983 that were processed but never published, yet the data remain valid today for historical purposes and for delimiting food web components within ecosystem assessments. I examined spring, summer, and fall foods in offshore populations of nine common species of trawl-susceptible fishes, with particular reference to predation on commercial penaeid shrimps (Farfantepenaeus and Litopenaeus). Diets were evaluated with the Index of Relative Importance (IRI) which combines the occurrence, number, and weight of each food item. Bank sea bass (Centropristis ocyurus) and bighead searobin (Prionotus tribulus) primarily consumed crabs, more so by larger than smaller fish. Inshore lizardfish (Synodus foetens) was almost entirely piscivorous. Ocellated flounder (Ancylopsetta ommata) consumed fishes, crabs, and stomatopods. Dwarf sand perch (Diplectrum bivittatum), blackwing searobin (Prionotus rubio), rock sea bass (Centropristis philadelphica), southern kingfish (Menticirrhus americanus), and red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) fed mainly on shrimps. Most fish diets varied with respect to size (age), time of day, area sampled, depth, or season. Rimapenaeus and Sicyonia were the most frequently identified shrimp genera - only five Farfantepenaeus and no Litopenaeus were identified in almost 4,300 fish stomachs. I also examined gonadal development and documented fish length-weight relationships. Ripe gonads were most frequently found during summer in dwarf sand perch, during fall in ocellated flounder and bighead searobin, and during spring for other species, except no ripe red snapper or bank sea bass were collected. Rock sea bass was found to be a protogynous hermaphrodite, while dwarf sand perch is a synchronous hermaphrodite. Only ocellated flounder and southern kingfish exhibited sex-related differences in length-weight relationships. (PDF contains 40 pages.

The Catholic Case: The Index of Prohibited Books

Sometimes it takes a while for the word to get out, or for it to get in. It has been said that, in India in 1948 as the British were leaving, there were villages that had not yet heard that they had arrived. Similarly, there may be villages in Tibet that have not yet heard that the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959. Deep in Siberia in the mid 1930\u27s, there were communities of Old Believers who did not know of the October Revolution in 1917. Googooling the words, Index of Prohibited Books, resulted in more than a million references. A perusal of the first seven entries revealed that none took any note that the Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books had been terminated in 1966, forty years before 2006. Similarly, the same perusal does not reveal the reasons why the Catholic Church abandoned what to many outside the Church had seemed one of its negative defining features, nor the reasons why the Church has become one of the world\u27s greatest defenders of a freedom of religion that precludes the prohibiting, censoring, and banning of books

Book Review: Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary Interpretation of Monistic Kashmiri Saiva Philosophy

A review of Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary Interpretation of Monistic Kashmiri Saiva Philosophy by David Peter Lawrence

Angels and Gods: A (Radically) Orthodox Experiment

This is the third in a series of orthodox Catholic theological experiments that I am conducting within the theology of relationship of Catholic faith to other religions. Each experiment attempts to ask a positive, existential question of one of the world religions about the reality of one of their reality assertions. Catholic orthodox theologies have almost always answered these questions in the negative, but in my tentative and provisional judgment the negative answers may be unnecessary. To re-ask the questions using the “eyes of faith,”1 the full weight and depth of orthodoxy must be brought to bear, not as a defensive posture that protects the faith, but instead as an exercise in confident Catholic inclusivity that will see how far it can go, in other words, to explore how inclusive Catholicity and orthodoxy can get

The Asymmetry of ‘Creation’ and ‘Origination’: Contrasts within Comparative Theology

THE following essay is a contribution to comparative theology, particularly in its contrastive dimension. For a successful comparative theology, the two theologies or religious perspectives being compared and contrasted must be described accurately and equally in depth. Where Christian theology in its Catholic dimension is one pole of the comparison, it is important to make a distinction between doctrine and theology which I will do below. Issues of translation also immediately arise

The Castle of Trim

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