Elephant management: why can't we throw out the babies with the artificial bathwater?

Elephant management is highly controversial and any elephant-related study is quickly seen as a pro or con for one of the usual elephant management practices ( laissez-faire , culling, contraception or metapopulation management). Managing water sources has also been suggested as one option, even though no experimental data exist. In a recent issue of Diversity and Distributions , Smit et al. (2007 ) rejected this management tool as an efficient method to control elephant distribution and dynamics in Kruger National Park, South Africa. However, we believe that (1) Smit et al. 's conclusion is poorly supported by the available data, and (2) that this non-intrusive management tool has the potential for being one of the few practices able to reconcile managers, scientists, and the public opinion in the never-ending 'elephant problem'. For these reasons, we believe that the strong conclusions of Smit et al. should be moderated.     

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: identifying and mapping paralogs in salmonids

Many eukaryotic genomes contain a large fraction of gene duplicates (or paralogs) as a result of ancient or recent whole‐genome duplications (Ohno 1970 ; Jaillon et al. 2004 ; Kellis et al. 2004 ). Identifying paralogs with NGS data is a pervasive problem in both ancient polyploids and neopolyploids. Likewise, paralogs are often treated as a nuisance that has to be detected and removed (Everett et al. 2012 ). In this issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, Waples et al. ( 2015 ) show that exclusion might not be necessary and how we may miss out on important genomic information in doing so. They present a novel statistical approach to detect paralogs based on the segregation of RAD loci in haploid offspring and test their method by constructing linkage maps with and without these duplicated loci in chum salmon, Oncorhynchus keta (Fig.  1 ). Their linkage map including the resolved paralogs shows that these are mostly located in the distal regions of several linkage groups. Particularly intriguing is their finding that these homoeologous regions appear impoverished in transposable elements (TE). Given the role that TE play in genome remodelling, it is noteworthy that these elements are of low abundance in regions showing residual tetrasomic inheritance. This raises the question whether re‐diploidization is constrained in these regions and whether they might have a role to play in salmonid speciation. This study provides an original approach to identifying duplicated loci in species with a pedigree, as well as providing a dense linkage map for chum salmon, and interesting insights into the retention of gene duplicates in an ancient polyploid.     

Retinal processing: smaller babies thrown out with bathwater

Rod bipolar cells in the mammalian retina receive synaptic input from many noisy rod photoreceptors. When photons are scarce, linear addition of inputs would swamp signals with noise. A nonlinearity at the synapse optimizes the signal to noise ratio.     

Distant plant homologues: don't throw out the baby

Plants and metazoans share many similarities in terms of conserved proteins. Antibodies have been used extensively to detect remote homologues, many of which are yet to be identified conclusively. Genome sequencing and the creation of novel sequence or structure comparison programs have assisted greatly in the identification of distant protein homologues. The continuing development of new software algorithms and the combining of bioinformatics with proteomics offer hope that remaining homologues will be soon identified.