Talk:Atlantic torpedo

Atlantic torpedo has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
February 21, 2010	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on December 7, 2009.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the Atlantic torpedo can produce an electric shock of up to 220 volts, and was the namesake of the naval weapon?

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Atlantic torpedo/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Ucucha 22:41, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It looks pretty good on a quick look. One comment: many of the journal references are probably available online; could you add links so that people will be able to locate them more easily? Ucucha 22:41, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll hunt some down, but many will not be publicly accessible. -- Yzx (talk) 02:19, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments (in no particular order):

~~"but the impact of these activities on its population is unknown." (lead) - The body of the article does not say this about the bycatches.~~

It's implied by the IUCN's Data Deficient status and the list of potential threats; I added a phrase to make this more clear

"Along with several other species of electric rays, the Atlantic torpedo is used as a model organism in biomedical research, as its electric organs are rich in acetylcholine receptor proteins." - to most people, the connection between having many acetylcholine receptors and being a good model organism won't be immediately clear; please expand a little.

Expanded

The taxonomy section is rather brief. What about the synonyms? Did people previously think the East and West Atlantic populations were separate species (for example)? What are the most closely related species?

My preference is to not mention synonyms in the prose unless they're noteworthy or interesting in some way; for just a list of what they are I feel that's what the synonyms section of the taxobox is for. I haven't read anything to suggest that the taxonomic history of this species is particularly tangled.

I agree that many obscure synonyms should not be mentioned in the article, but you could say something like: "Several other species that were described in later years were recognized as synonyms of T. nobiliana by [year], and the taxonomy of the species has mostly remained stable since." Ucucha 02:42, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I actually don't know when the synonyms were synonymized with T. nobiliana. The only resource I can think of for this is the Catalog of Fishes, which lists a reference for the synonymy but not necessarily the first reference in which the synonymy was made.

OK, fair enough, we can't have everything. Ucucha 03:01, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To my knowledge there is no phylogenetic information on the interrelationships of Torpedo species. There's only the division between the subgenera T. Torpedo and T. Tetronarce.

~~"as well as from Namibia to western South Africa" - the distribution on the map looks more like it extends to eastern SA~~

Fixed

~~You seem to be using "this species" and "this ray" a bit too often. Perhaps replace a few occurrences with "the species", "the ray" or "it".~~

Swapped out a few; I feel though that "the species" or "the ray" sound grammatically off.

That's it for now; I may have more comments later. Ucucha 23:31, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Let me know of further issues. -- Yzx (talk) 02:19, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You appropriately link technical terms, but I think the article would be improved if you would also briefly explain some in the text (for example, "caudal (tail) fin"). Ucucha 02:42, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Normally I'd agree, but in the case of fish fins I think it's a case where the reader just has to know them (or look them up), and it doesn't make sense to me to define one fin but not the others. Are there other examples of these terms? -- Yzx (talk) 02:51, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

spiracles, aplacental viviparous (explained in the body but not the lead), pelagic, nares, denticles, perhaps a few others. Ucucha 03:01, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Rephrased or added parenthetical terms for them. -- Yzx (talk) 03:09, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the quick fixes. I am now happy to pass this article for GA. Ucucha 03:14, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! -- Yzx (talk) 03:18, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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