Feedback Needed on the Cichlid Book

I never make mistakes!! Well, almost never. Would you believe, more than I like to admit?

Have you written a book? I must have read over 1,000 articles and books while working on the cichlid book. I took notes. Lots of them. But notes can be traps. Different authors use different names for the same species, not because they are careless but because the reports were published at different times and in the meantime names changed. Consequently, you might find I have slipped and used two different names for the same fish in different places. If you notice mistakes like that, help me. Send the correction.

Thorichthys meeki

Another type of error is just getting things wrong. Even though I frequently referred to my notes, I do depend on my memory most of the time. Occasionally my memory does not serve (the more so with each passing year) and I get things wrong. For instance, I might have reported an amazing piece of natural history and done something dumb, such as saying things got bigger when I should have said smaller, or just botched the whole thing.

Demand for the book is surprisingly high and is exceeding my expectation. Down the road, a new edition may be in order as more papers are published on cichlid fishes. If that happens, I would hate to repeat mistakes made in the first edition, so do let me know about mistakes that you find.

Keep in mind, however, that sometimes people such as you are actually wrong and I'm right. Impossible, you say. Or maybe we simply disagree, which is more likely, say, over some aspect of theory. In my experience, a few readers have cherished beliefs that they have picked up somewhere in the dim past. Misconceptions can become reality and get passed on. Therefore, at times I may be so high-handed that I reject your recommended change. But we can exchange correspondence on those matters. Just get involved. I'll post relevant finding below, under Whoops.

Whoops!

Page 35 (5/21/01): The first name of the famous ichthyologist Trewavas is misspelled. It should be Ethelwynn.

Page 47 (5/21/01): A terrible breakdown in memory. Fourteen lines up from the bottom I wrote that a fish has 'typically three such arches.' Painful. Fishes typically have four gill arches.

Page 166 (5/1/01): In the bottom half of the page, I refer to two species of cichlids, Haplochromis elegans and Astatotilapia elegans. As Les Kaufman has pointed out in a review of the book, these are the same species. According to the late P. Humphrey Greenwood, the correct name for the genus is Astatotilapia.

Page 195-196 (3/22/01): When writing the book, I overlooked a reference to a publication and, I'm embarrassed to say, one that I have in my library. In the book, I wrote that Jack Ward and I reported that in the absence of parents, the fry of the orange chromide are difficult to raise. We implied that the parents might be supplying their young with some nutrient essential to their development. One of Jack Ward's students, James Cole, subsequently made a special study of this and found that whether young were raised with or without parents has no effect. Differences in mortality and growth were trivial. For more details, see Minnier and Cole (1973) Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Academy of Science 47:117-121.