Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The Antillean manatee (Trichechus manatus manatus) is endangered due to anthropogenic activities, which affect both the manatee’s health and use of habitats required for their survival. The spatial distribution and use of the manatee habitat on the southern coast of Puerto Rico was obtained using helicopter aerial surveys and was related to zoogeographic, environmental and oceanographic factors. A total of 33 surveys were conducted along the southern coast from 2001 to 2015. There was a total of 488 sightings and 914 individuals, which represents 13 manatees per hour of effort, 12.4% being calves. No correlation was found between their presence and seasons, sea surface temperature, or currents. The use of freshwater and seagrass bed resources did not present a statistical relationship, but it is clear that they are part of their nature and necessary for their survival. However, the depth and degree of protection offered by the bays is decisive to predict the presence of manatees. A marked increase in the number of manatees per hour of effort between 2007 and 2015 represents a possible population growth. Given that the survival of manatees in Puerto Rico is threatened by different natural and anthropogenic factors, this study, together with studies on telemetry and habitat use, should help designate future protected areas critical for their survival.

Aspects such as anthropic effects, loss of biodiversity, species displacement, introduction of exotic species, and demographic growth have caused an increase in crop yield, recovery of impacted sites, reintroduction of species and the search for alternatives to understand and evaluate reproduction of native fish species. In such context, knowing and using both female and male gametes for massive larvae production creates the need to use methodologies that would allow sorting the brood stock with genetic and physiological traits that would improve the quantity and quality of larvae to be used for massive culture, restocking, breeding production, and experiments on basic and applied sciences. This bibliographic review mentions the particularities of fish sperm cells and methodological alternatives to assess quality, by understanding activation physiology (motility percentages and times, type of movement and sperm number), including the structural analysis at extracellular and intracellular levels (spermatic morphology, damage to the membrane, comet assay, live/dead/apoptotic cells, which depend on the main objectives of reproduction or experimental programs). The development of automated cytometry and unicellular genomics equipment has allowed for a better understanding of the functioning of spermatic cells, genetic expression linked to cellular qualities and their biological implication.

In order to study the phytoplankton structure in the gulf of Papagayo, 2 sampling cruises were conducted in February and June of 2017, and hydrographic information was additionally analyzed. The phytoplankton composition was dominated in both months by diatoms, dinoflagellates, cyanobacteria and flagellates. The fraction of diatoms contributed mainly to the phytoplankton structure with 41 taxa, followed by dinoflagellates with 20 taxa. In diatoms, the genera with the greatest contribution to diversity and frequency were Rhizosolenia sp., Guinardia sp., and Thalassiosira sp. In the case of dinoflagellates, Tripos furca predominated in station 20 located in Culebra Bay, while Gyrodiniumspirale was frequent, as well as genera Gymnodinium sp., Gyrodinium sp., and Amphidinium sp. Cyanobacteria were mainly composed by genera Analysis sp. and Chroococcus sp. and haptoficeas and flagellates, by the Coccolitoforids and the genus Chrysocromulina sp., respectively. In February the phytoplankton concentration varied between 326 and 1063 cells mL-1, and in June between 653 and 1041 cells mL-1, with mesotrophic characteristics in both seasons. The gulf’s hydrography is regulated by the annual rainfall cycle and the seasonal coastal upwelling of Papagayo. In February, as opposed to October, surface temperature decreased by 3°C, salinity increased by 2 and chlorophyll-a concentration increased by 0.5 mg .m-3. Warmer waters, with lower saline and chlorophyll-a concentrations in October (T > 29°, S < 32.2, Chl-a < 0.5 mg m-3) are opposed to February results.

The coastline is a heterogeneous ecosystem that includes a supralittoral fringe, a midlittoral zone, and an infralittoral fringe, with mollusk species that serve as indicators of vertical zonation. This study contributes to the knowledge of richness and vertical distribution of intertidal mollusks in Islay, Arequipa, Peru. An intensive search was conducted during November and December 2013 to determine richness. A total of 3 25x25 cm grids where located perpendicularly to the seashore with 14 repetitions in each of the 7 study sites, to establish their vertical distribution. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA), nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) and rank-abundance curves were used to determine vertical distribution. In addition, an Analysis of Similarities (ANOSIM) was utilized to determine differences between mollusk compositions between study sites and subzones. A total of 57 taxa were found, where Echinolittorina peruviana was the most representative species in the supralittoral fringe, Perumytilus purpuratus in the midlittoral zone and Tegula atra in the infralittoral fringe. No significant differences were found in the mollusk composition between study sites. However, there were differences among sub-areas, where the midlittoral zone had the greatest richness and abundance of organisms. There were more similarities between the middle and infra-subzones with respect to the supralittoral fringe.

Se reporta por primera vez la presencia de un organismo albino de Ariopsis felis capturado por la flota palangrera artesanal de Tabasco a 68.6 km de la costa y 49 m de profundidad, el ejemplar correspondió a una hembra sexualmente madura con longitud furcal de 31.5 cm y peso total de 406.7 g. El presente estudio aumenta los registros de especies albinas en el sureste del Golfo de México.

In 2017 a mass mortality event of the reef fish Canthigaster rostrata was observed on the Southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The 86 subjects collected, possibly juveniles, were less than 49 mm and below 2.8 g. Similar events have been reported in other Caribbean locations and may be associated with changes in sea temperature or resource exhaustion during their recruitment period.

Cabo Pulmo National Park is among the most successful protected areas in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and harbors the most northern coral reef in that region. The objective of this paper was to update the latest published checklist of fishes at the park. Over 500 censuses were conducted between 2004 and 2017. In addition, an extensive bibliographic review was conducted of records published on the local ichthyofauna from 2001 to 2017. As a result, 69 new records of reef fish species were added to the Cabo Pulmo reef checklist, corresponding to 24 orders, 35 families and 51 genera. With these additions, the current updated checklist consists of 302 species, corresponding to 194 genera, 74 families, and 24 orders.

In the last few years a great number of novels dealing with the Spanish Civil War appeared in the literary market. It is a strange phenomenon, considering that the society that emerged after Franco’s dictatorship was like a society without memory, a society that turned the past into a taboo. However, at the end of the twentieth century, the Spanish society begun to organize itself in order to fight against oblivion, to recover the past. The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was founded in 2000, and, a few years later, in 2007, during the administration of the president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE), the so-called Historical Memory Law was passed. This article tries to shed light on this literary phenomenon and how the Spanish Civil War is represented in these novels. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate how these novels reproduces two consensuses: the consensus of the Transition –based on amnesia, amnesty and equidistance–, and, on the other hand, the neoliberal consensus, that affirms we are living in post-political times and in the so-called “end of History”.

This paper proposes a critical approach about the place of the Indians in the Mesoamerican Conquest and colonization. To this purpose, we will use the notion of “Indian Conquistadors” to analyze and interpret Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1584). We will follow four interconnected approaches. The first proposes a theoretical and methodological background about the notion of Indian Conquistadors. The second refers to the Descripción’s context of production and its contents. The third uses the notion of Indian conquistadors to reveal some specific aspects within the written text of the Descripción and in a selection of its well-known images. Finally, the fourth reconsiders the purpose of Muñoz Camargo’s hitorical-literary narration about the tlaxcalans’ collaboration as conquerers in Mesoamerica.

Taking into account the concept of “topologies of Being” with which Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres reflects upon the role of spatiality in the articulation of colonial subjects, I analyze the place that ideas such as fatherhood, fatherland and war occupy in José Martí’s poetic configuration of his lyric subjectivity in the early poetry of exile of Ismaelillo (1882). Additionally, I follow the analysis of Cuban critic Cintio Vitier on the value of some tropes in Martí’s poetry, in order to propose that the hostile historic atmosphere which the lyric “I” seeks to ethically control through the bifurcation of a single metaphor into opposite ethical meanings. This procedure,which I call antithetical trope, anticipates later ethic and poetic divisions inspired by what critic Julio Ramos defines as an “auratic concept of culture” and, as I suggest, by the type of modern anguish Sigmund Freud would describe in 1919 as “the uncanny”.