Peter Wirtz

Independent Researcher

There appears to be a correlation between colour intensity and latitude in some shallow water marine species, for instance a starfish being dark red in the tropics and pale/pink at its northern edge of distribution. Does anybody know a reference about this which I can quote ?

peterwirtz2004@yahoo.com ?

The "Instructions for authors" of some journals are now four times (!) as long as they were 40 years ago. Many of the demands made in them are totally unnecessary, and many of them I consider unreasonable. The demand of an Orcid number is a recent example (voluntary ok, compulsory no).

In my opinion, journals should accept articles in any format for submission (e.g. authors in the references not in capitals, year of publication not in brackets, journal name not in bold print, ... or whatever other demands that journal makes). Adapting to the format of that particular journal should be necessary only after acceptance. To re-write the publication list for a different journal (after, for instance, a reviewer has rejected the paper and demanded more data even though they are not necessary for the point made) is one of the most stupid wastes of my lifetime I know...

Which journals in the area of zoology are the least demanding as regards formatting ?

Peter Wirtz (peterwirtz2004@yahoo.com).

In a nice article on a mimicry system

it is stated that model and mimic have to co-occur.

I believe this is wrong.

Imagine a migratory bird that encounters the model in Africa and the mimic in Europe (or vice versa). Model and mimic do not have to co-occur. They only have to be experienced by the same individual.

Does anybody know such cases ?

Peter

When, many years ago, the journal Animal Behaviour started to demand ethics statements for articles submitted to them, I objected to it for the following reasons:

1) It is morally wrong to demand that the innocent should prove their innocence.

2) The bad guys will simply lie.

And therefore ethic statements are a useless addition to all those many many submission requirements that already have no other effect than to waste time and energy (on ORCID number is one of the latest and particularly inane examples that comes to mind).

A recent article on the molecular phylogeny of Octopus has now added an additional twist to the story. The authors blithely state

“No live animals were experimented on during this study. Tissue samples were obtained via donation from existing museum or university collections, or taken from whole deceased animals that were purchased from fish markets.”

This is quite simply untrue. When I collected a tissue sample from an Octopus in a tide pool at Ascension Island, I grabbed one of its tentacles and quickly cut a small piece of the tip off it. I think that this corresponds to a small would the animal might obtain in the course of its life and I have only a moderately bad conscience about it. So how come the authors made this wrong statement ? They do not know because they received the sample via a third person ! And also: how were those other samples collected ? Is it ok if somebody else tortures animals and deposits them in a museum and then you use them for a genetic study ?

So here is another reason why ethic statements in journal are a farce: they force authors to make statements about things they do not know.

Peter Wirtz