This study reports the presence of Kudoa neothunni in yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) landed in Portugal. The parasite was detected in fish harvested from the Indian and Pacific Oceans but not in the Atlantic Ocean specimens. Muscle samples collected from specimens were examined macroscopically and microscopically for parasitic infections. While no Kudoa cysts were observed macroscopically, microscopic analysis revealed K. neothunni in 10 fish (5 each from the Pacific and Indian Oceans), with a prevalence of 20.8% and 20%, respectively. Histological examinations confirmed the presence of Kudoa cysts in infected muscle tissue. Morphological analyses showed stellate spores with 6 polar capsules, and significant differences in spore length and polar capsule dimensions were found between isolates from the 2 oceanic regions. However, phylogenetic analysis based on small and large ribosomal subunit sequences indicated that both spores were consistent with K. neothunni and showed high (100%) similarity to previously published GenBank sequences. These results contribute to the current knowledge of K. neothunni occurrence in yellowfin tuna and indicate that infected specimens originating from the Indian and Pacific Oceans enter the European seafood market. Given that some Kudoa infections can induce post-mortem myoliquefaction and adversely affect fillet quality, this should be considered a potential concern.

Entamoeba bovis is a common intestinal amoeba of ruminants, yet molecularly confirmed data from Europe remain limited. We investigated the occurrence, morphology and genetic variability of E. bovis in Italian domestic and wild ruminants and developed a rapid species-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay. Faecal samples from calves (n = 45), goats (n = 26), sheep (n = 11) and Italian red deer Cervus elaphus italicus (n = 25) were examined by sediment microscopy and iodine staining. Amoebic stages were detected in 57% of bovine, 61.5% of caprine, 100% of ovine and 56% of red deer samples. Across hosts, cysts were consistently uninucleate and displayed typical E. bovis morphology, including frequent chromatoid bodies and an iodophilic glycogen mass. Representative positives were sequenced at the 18S rRNA locus (∼800 bp), confirming E. bovis (98.6–99.8% identity; 100% query coverage). Maximum-likelihood phylogenetic analysis placed all Italian isolates within the E. bovis clade and indicated a shared lineage across domestic ruminants and red deer, with no segregation by host or ecological setting. A newly designed E. bovis-specific PCR (375 bp) consistently yielded a single amplicon in all sequenced positives, supporting its use for rapid screening without sequencing.

The effect of sound change and analogy upon inflectional paradigms has been traditionally described through Sturtevant’s Paradox, which states that sound change is regular but generates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but generates regularity. While past work has explored trends in sound change and analogy qualitatively, quantitative investigation with large data sets remains underexploited. We tackle this by exploring the effects of sound change and analogy from Latin to French in large etymologically paired inflected lexicons containing the complete paradigms of 310 verbs with 11,593 total forms. We employ a novel method combining the automated application of historical sound changes and entropy-based quantitative analysis to examine separately the effects of sound change and analogy. The results confirm the role of some oft-cited predictors of analogy like token frequency and morphological regularity, but offer no support for others like markedness. Results also confirm the complexifying role of sound change, and the simplifying role of analogy, on aspects of morphological complexity like the number of inflection classes and the amount of allomorphy, but suggest that these forces have no comparable effect on more modern measures of complexity like average conditional entropies between inflected forms.

Acquiring morphology poses a considerable challenge in second language acquisition (SLA), highlighting the need to explore methods that facilitate this task for L2 learners. One potential facilitator is salience, which is theorized to aid language acquisition by directing learners’ attention to certain linguistic elements. To empirically investigate the impact of one type of salience, perceptual salience, a text-based eye-tracking experiment was conducted with 68 L1 Dutch speakers who read 240 sentences in Englishti, an English-based semi-artificial language featuring perceptually high-salient (-ulp) and low-salient (-o) morphemes according to length. Learning context was manipulated with participants being either assigned to an intentional or an incidental paradigm. The task consisted of two phases: a learning phase involving input flooding of the target morphemes followed by content-related questions, and a testing phase where participants completed a grammaticality judgment task on Englishti sentences, half of which were familiar from the learning phase and half of which were new. The results revealed a significant influence of salience, mediated by learning context and English proficiency, on fixation durations, thus empirically confirming the effect of perceptual salience on attention allocation in L2 morphology acquisition.

In this report, morphological and molecular characteristics are provided for two members of the subfamily Microphalloidea distributed in the south of the Russian Far East. Some of trematode specimens found in larvae of mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies and then experimentally reared to the adult stage in hamsters, according to their morphological features, belong to the species Acanthatrium ovatum previously recorded from Japanese bats. Molecular data has confirmed their membership in the family Lecithodendriidae and similarity to trematodes identified as Lecithodendriidae sp. F from Japan. The other specimens, experimentally reared in chickens, according to their morphological characteristics, meet the diagnostic criteria of the genus Parabascus. However, this species is not clustered with representatives of this taxon in the phylogenetic reconstruction based on 28S rRNA gene data. A molecular analysis has shown that it forms a single cluster with Pachypsolus irroratus and is a member of the family Pachypsolidae. It is here placed in the new genus Pseudoparabascus n. g. under the name Pseudoparabascus khotenovskii comb. n. The phylogenetic reconstructions based on two other markers, the cox1 mtDNA gene and the ITS2 rDNA region, have confirmed the assignment of these specimens obtained in both experiments to the above-considered taxonomic groups.

Cercariae of two trematode species from the family Notocotylidae were found in the snails Radix auricularia and Boreoelona ussuriensis. Sexually mature flukes were obtained by experimentally infecting a duckling and a few chickens, respectively, with metacercariae from the found cercariae. Based on a combination of morphological and molecular (nuclear and mitochondrial markers) evidence, the trematodes grown in the duckling were identified as Notocotylus ikutai. The adult flukes obtained from the infected chickens were assigned to trematodes previously grouped into the genus Catatropis on the basis of morphological characteristics, including the structure of tegumental papillae. However, according to molecular data, the found trematodes were differentiated at the generic level from other Notocotylidae. Based on the above evidence, we here erect a genus, Neocatatropis n. g., to accommodate the type species Neocatatropis primorskii n. g. n. sp.

This study examines the interaction between regularity and complexity in the acquisition of morphology and morpho-syntax in Hebrew nominal inflection. Seventy-eight Hebrew-speaking children, ages 4–8, were tested, using sentence completion tasks, on nine structures from three linguistic systems: singular adjectival agreement, noun pluralization, and plural adjectival agreement. Regularity and complexity emerged as organizing factors across ages: regular structures precede irregular ones, and within each level of regularity, less complex structures were acquired before more complex ones. The findings are discussed within the Dual-Route Model pointing to the difference between rule-governed and memory-based knowledge, while suggesting that the advantage of regularity could be attributed to frequency as well as to the strength of regularity cues in language acquisition, as proposed by Usage-Based models. The advantage of less complex structures over more complex ones is accounted for by the greater cognitive and linguistic effort required to acquire the latter.

Hearts with a double-inlet and double-outlet right ventricle are infrequent. Due to their infrequency, it is unclear whether there are natural patterns in hearts like this. A systematic review was performed to identify published cases of double-inlet double-outlet right ventricle. Characteristics for individual reported hearts were collated and entered into a cluster analysis. Hearts with double-inlet, double-outlet right ventricles tended to fall into two clusters largely based on aortic atresia and systemic venous connections.

The case-number suffixes of the Western Nilotic language Nuer (Frank 1999) display a remarkable combination of formal simplicity and distributional complexity, which is manifested in: (i) a seemingly erratic form-function mapping that precludes attributing a consistent meaning to the suffixes, and (ii) a wealth of inflection classes only barely differentiated from each other. The suffixes looks as if they were rule-generated, but behave as if they were memorized. I advance a model of inflection combining principal parts, implicational rules, and default inheritance, in which the bulk of the complexity is attributed to the lexical stem, revealing the underlying systematicity behind suffix assignment.

Free association (e.g., what is the first word that comes to mind when given a cue word) can reveal multiple linguistic relationships between cues and responses, even when a specific association (i.e., semantic, phonological) is intended. In this study, we investigated the influence of morphological similarity on semantic and phonological free association. Previously collected large datasets were used to evaluate morphological similarity between cues and responses in a semantic association task and a phonological association task. The results indicate that morphologically related cue–response word pairs comprised less than 2% of pairs in both association tasks. When morphologically related responses were detected in both tasks, we found more words that were non-compounds than compounds, more decomposition than composition and more suffixation than prefixation. There were task-specific differences in the psycholinguistic properties of cue words eliciting morphologically related responses. We interpret the results following a two-stage lexical model, where free association primarily involves the exploration of conceptual/lemma representations in the mental lexicon, as opposed to form/lexeme representations.