Kat has a new paper out

[Steve O'Shea]

Click here to read all about sexual dimorphism in Moroteuthis ingens beaks.

Not sure if you can download it without a password, but I'm sure Kat will tell you all about it when she returns from her dive trip this weekend.

 

[tonmo]

I am hoping we'll get it on TONMO.com soon...!

 

[Tintenfisch]

I need to check with the Journal about their copyright policy, but if they're sticky about it, I could always sum it up in a more lay-user-friendly TONMO.com article.

 

[monty]

Ooh la la! Beaky French kissing! This seems like great work, since so much about cephs is extrapolated from beaks, the more we can extrapolate to the whole animal from the beak, the better. Are Moroteuthis unusual in that so much can be told from the beaks, or is this just the particular example you looked at?

 

[Tintenfisch]

Mmmm yeah, all that radular grinding! A couple things coincided to cause the penny drop moments of this paper; one was the collection of ~500 M. ingens beaks, all with this weird erosion, together in the sperm whale stomach, plus those interlocked ones. Another was that I was redescribing the morphology of all the NZ onychoteuthid beaks so I was checking a few specimens at a time for continuity and it became obvious quickly that the males and females were very different. As for the mating thing, well, it was the only good explanation for why submature individuals didn't have the signature breakages, while mature ones did, AND why the breakage pattern was specific to male or female individuals. Felipe (leewayducks on TONMO) and I had a couple of interesting discussions that refined the theory, and then... viola!

 

[Graeme]

Sounds interesting, I will have a look!

Actually sounds right up my alley.

 

[Thales]

Yay KAT!

Glad its done!

 

[Tintenfisch]

Me too.

 

[Tintenfisch]

More good news - I just heard that the paper I presented at CIAC in February (on the NZ onychoteuthid fauna, 60 pages long and representing the first 1/4 of my thesis) will be accepted following three very minor changes! The ingens paper was satisfying, but now I really feel like I'm getting somewhere...

 

[monty]

I'm a little confused, though-- does that mean it was accepted in the role of thesis, or in the role of CIAC publication? Does CIAC let you present just based on a proposal or abstract, and then do the peer review for the publication after the fact?

 

[Tintenfisch]

Yep - you submit an abstract that is accepted for presentation at CIAC itself, then submit the manuscript at the end of the conference, and it goes out for review (sometimes more than once ). The Proceedings from CIAC 2006 will be coming out as a special issue of Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries. So the paper I presented at CIAC, the redescription of the NZ onychoteuthid fauna, will be published as an article in that issue of RFBF. And then included as part of my thesis as well.

 

[Fujisawas Sake]

Interesting abstract. I wonder how they find mates to begin with, let alone why they would be beak-to-beak.