The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Gog the Mild via FACBot (talk) 24 January 2025 [1].

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Nominator(s): TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 17:15, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the New Zealand paddle crab, Ovalipes catharus. It's one of twelve species of Ovalipes and the only one found in New Zealand. Known for their paddle-shaped rear legs, high aggression, voraciousness, and proneness to cannibalism. I found this a couple months back in this state, where its last two major contributions were by Prosperosity and Ttbioclass (the latter being a student editor who did almost all of the work on the 'Mating and reproduction' section). However, major edits prior to these – while helping to expand the article – had what I felt were severe problems with copy-editing and focus (for example, at one point, comparing these crabs to prawns by saying they don't have a narrow body and tail). I quickly realized I had to rip out basically everything before the 'Mating and reproduction' section and start from scratch, and so I did. I worked on improving this to GA status over a month or so, reviewed by Esculenta, and at this point, I want to stress test it as a FAC because I think I've done about as much as I can with it after the GA review.

Disclaimers:

• The Osborne 1987 PhD thesis is cited so much because it really was a landmark work on O. catharus. Attempts to cite peer-reviewed journal articles for this information would just result in citing something that cites Osborne 1987 in some way which is likely indirect to what we need to communicate. I promise it seems absurd until you realize that probably 80% of the works cited in this article also cite Osborne in some way; it's just that seminal.
• The Richards 1992 master's thesis is discussed in the GA review, and I think its usage is easily defensible. The R.J. Davidson 1987 master's thesis was written at a time where R.J. Davidson was already an expert on this behavior, having published about almost this exact subject the year prior (note there are two pre-eminent O. catharus experts named Davidson, the other being G.W.).
• There are still unused refideas which I've suggested, but for the vast majority of them, I think they walk a fine line between meticulous and extraneous detail. I just keep them there in case someone has a revelation about how to include them in a relevant way (or, in the case of H.H. Taylor et al. 1992, in case I ever get access to that $200 book).
• I really would love to have better images in the infobox (the dorsal view of the preserved specimen is a great angle but lacks the real colors of O. catharus due to the preservation, and the ventral view despite being a great angle with correct colors is literally a dead crab in a puddle on the shore), but these were the best suitably licensed images I could find of these two crucial perspectives of the crab.
• If there's anything even remotely important I didn't cover in the article, you can probably audit that by checking either in the Fisheries 2023 citation or the McLay 1988 one.
• I had minimal involvement with the 'Mating and reproduction' section, but reviewing it, it seems to hold up. I've since rewritten the entire 'Mating and reproduction' section to my liking. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 17:15, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

• File:Ovalipes_australiensis_dorsal.jpg: licensing doesn't match source. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:09, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm very confused. At Commons, I licensed it under "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International". At the source, it's licensed under "Copyright Museums Victoria / CC BY (Licensed as Attribution 4.0 International)". I don't see the discrepancy. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 19:33, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies; I was looking at something else. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:07, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's all good! It just worried me for a second because I'm convinced that's the only genuinely good freely licensed image of this variety on the entire Internet. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 02:35, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh, New Zealand biology? Mark me down for a prose review to come. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 05:47, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• TheTechnician27 A most preliminary thought; this would be quite a good use case for SFNs or Harvids. Especially with larger sources like Osborne 1987, readers will struggle with where to find the claim within the source material without a page number for each cite. This will also make the job of source reviewers much, much easier. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 05:51, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  I was thinking about doing that, but I didn't know to what extent they were used for journal articles/theses rather than books. I can definitely go ahead and implement that (today, even), since I agree it'd be especially useful for Osborne 1987. Incidentally, I checked out Endemic flora of the Chatham Islands on your list of articles to see if O. catharus was there (before noticing it said "endemic" and "flora", duh), and then I realized it was a FLC. Since I've been thinking about featured lists myself (like is Paralomis a list or an article? I really don't know at this point!), I think I'll familiarize myself with the criteria and take a look at it. This isn't an invitation for you not to tear this article to shreds, though; since I'm tentatively planning to target another species of Ovalipes, I have a personal, vested interest in making this article as robust as possible to be able to draw on its structure in the future. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 15:18, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Generalissima is being tactful. Eg, if I were reviewing then - to select the first random example I came across - I would want each of those ten references to Haddon narrowing down to something tighter than the entire six-page article; ideally a single page each. Even as a closing coordinator I would be unhappy if there were several like that, or if they had longer page ranges. Like Haddon and Wear, or Fenton et al. As for Glaessner - you want me to wade through 55 pages to verify your cite?! I recommend that you take Generalissima's advice and beseech her to keep giving it. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:24, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To answer your question above tho, I think the typical strategy for large genera like that is to have the genus article be an article while splitting off the table of each species into its own list (though a basic taxonomic list of species without the details/subspecies/etc. is often included within the genus article itself from what i've seen) Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 00:16, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

All done! All remaining sources which don't use {{sfn}} are ones where we only use at most three pages. The lone exception to this is Vennell 2022, which spans six pages, because I don't have access to the book and have to take (and willingly trust) Prosperosity's word for it. I wasn't trying to pull a fast one here; I just didn't know what the typical sentiment around using {{sfn}} for journal articles and theses was compared to book citations. @Gog the Mild:, I did ask for this article to be torn to shreds, so I hope you'll believe me when I say that I appreciate the nature and manner of your feedback. During this process, I also corrected several pieces of misinformation, and I strongly believe these were among the last if not the last ones. A few of these were small-to-moderate mistakes I directly made, but some were in the 'Mating and reproduction' section which I realize in hindsight that I was inappropriately lax and frankly negligent in my review of. I think I had a subtle preconceived notion going in that this was the "good part" of the article. I apologize for grinding the review to a halt right as it got started, but I think it should be able to proceed as normal now. If nothing else, this probably cleared out several problems that would've come up anyway. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 06:08, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Generalissima, just querying if you were still intending to do a full prose review. Gog the Mild (talk) 16:41, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• One comment: I can't do a full review, but its recommended that there be no cites in the lead paragraphs. They are meant to summarize the body of the article which should already be cited. Otherwise, good luck. We need a crab FA article. LittleJerry (talk) 00:29, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  I understand the premise here, but I heavily disagree that the lead should be uncited. This sort of stylistic prescriptivism 1) directly contradicts WP:LEADCITE which indicates editors are free to choose either way, 2) makes the lead substantially less maintainable by forcing editors to go digging in the article to then find a citation, and 3) is to the detriment of a reader who might simply want to get the gist of a subject but still wants to verify something we're saying. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 05:02, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Apologies this took me a sec, was waiting for some other prose fixes to finish up and then forgot about it (oops)
  • Lede is good, I don't see any problems there.
• Description also solid; only mistake I see is instead of linking Chatham Islands here, you link it quite a bit later.

• I link to Chatham Islands in 'Distribution & Habitat' instead of 'Description' since it seems more relevant in 'Distribution & Habitat' and I want to avoid a dupe link, but I see what you mean. I'm on the fence about this one, because I think all three options are correct (put it up top, keep it down below, or do both).

• Physiogy good.
• "Māori: pāpaka" seems a bit clunky in running prose - maybe "or in Māori, pāpaka"?

• Even though I think it looks a bit more awkward due to the abundance of commas, I've changed it since this is the second time it's been brought up, so there's a good chance I'm just wrong.

• May be good to mention that the Chatham Islands are a significant distance away from the Main Islands of New Zealand, for those unfamiliar.

• I feel like stopping to mention that the Chatham Islands are distant from the mainland is a WP:COATRACK. Their physical distance from the mainland is only relevant to their genetic separation, and within 'Description', I call it an "isolated population", thereby providing the relevant information.

• Might be good to briefly gloss chelae

• Chelae is glossed in the 'Description' section (well, 'chela' is, but this is just a plural).

• Might be good to gloss tā moko as tattooing

• Done, and also provided a gloss for wharenui.

@TheTechnician27: That's all - sorry it took a bit for me to do a full read through

• Seriously all good! I'm happy this FAC is getting literally any attention at all; I expected it to be far too niche. Thank you! TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 02:05, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• @Generalissima: I just realized I never pinged you during my reply to your feedback. I'm wondering – if you're fully done with your review and seeing what I've done in response to it – if you're at a point where you feel comfortable giving an oppose or a support vote for this nom. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 20:28, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Support Oh sorry, I never saw this until you pinged! Yes, things look good now. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 21:03, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Great to see this here! Looks mostly good, but I have two general concerns that should be addressed:

First, the article could be more accessible. Please have a look at WP:MTAU. This is especially important for an FA, since when it appears on the main page, it will be read by non-experts. You are not writing for experts. Specifically, whenever possible, the reader should not have to follow links in order to get a basic understanding of the text. In some cases, you could replace jargon with more common terms (maybe "pincers" and "rearward" instead of "proximal"), and in others, you could add a brief in-text explanation in brackets. In particular, I think that these terms would benefit from such an in-text explanation: chelipeds, dactyli, fingers (what does it mean in the context of crabs?), isometric, osmoconformer/osmoregulator, stenotherm, Phosphorylation of ADP.

Second, the "Taxonomy" and "Diet" sections seem to be shorter and less specific than other sections (particularly the description section). The Diet section contains some general statements that are already covered in much greater detail in the "Description" (maybe it is worth to move those discussions down to "Diet")? And maybe rename the section to the more general "Feeding"? There are a couple of papers concerned with specific aspects on the biology of this species, so there seems to be more to add. Regarding the taxonomy:

• can we add the etymology of "catharus"?
• maybe there is something more to add on the research history? Circumstances of the 1843 description maybe? For example, was the description based on life specimens, or based on a collected one (holotype collected where?)
• The "Taxonomy" should have a little bit on the classification of Ovalipes itself. Yes, you have a footnote, but I think it warrants spelling out in the main text. Also, it does not seem there is consensus that Ovalipes sits within Ovalipidae, as this study ([2]) proposes something else.

Other comments:

• Ovalipes catharus has an oval-shaped, streamlined, and slightly grainy carapace with five large teeth to either side of the eyes and four teeth at the front. It is overall sandy grey with orange-red highlights and dotted with small, brown spots. Its carapace – I suggest to switch the order. Discuss the color (including the white underside, too), and then the carapace shape, or vice versa, but not carapace -> color -> carapace -> color as it is currently.
• a butterfly-shaped mark – remove the link to "butterfly"? It does not help I think.
• somewhat hairy, and a line of setae runs from – Is "hairy" refering to setae, too, or are these different structures?
• as a form of signalling – link to Animal communication?
• chelae – maybe replace with "pincer" or add that word in a bracket)?
• on the posterior border of the arms – what is the "posterior border"? Doesn't that depend on posture?
• but it may exhibit negative allometry in males – add "(grows more slowely)"?
• Relative length diminishes compared to the width – the "relative" is redundant here, I propose to remove it.
• It can reverse its ventilatory flow – It would help to add a bit of context here; what does it mean to reverse the ventilatory flow, and why are they doing that?
• Internal anatomy – This section has much stuff that's not anatomy, including the paragraph on biochemistry.
• Ovalipes catharus is colloquially known as the paddle crab, the common swimming crab, or Māori: pāpaka. They were – Here you address the species in plural, elsewhere you use singular. That should be consistent (I think the convention is to use singular when talking about the species).
• Having been synonymised with O. punctatus alongside three other species prior to 1968, O. catharus is part of a distinct subgroup of Ovalipes which also includes O. australiensis, O. elongatus, O. georgei, O. punctatus, – When O. punctatus is a synonym, why is that one still listed and appears as a separate species in the cladogram?
• fine granules on the raised ridges of the top side of its hands – "Hands"? Are these the pincers?
• Ovalipes catharus is native to New Zealand, where it can be found from Stewart Island to Northland and in the Chatham Islands. They are also uncommon on the southern coast of Australia – "also uncommon" somehow implies they are uncommon in New Zealand.
• Members of the isolated population of O. catharus from the Chatham Islands tend to be larger and take longer to mature than those in mainland New Zealand. – that does not belong under "Taxonomy" I think.
• The following cladogram – It would help to date this (e.g., "from a 1998 study") and indicate on what it is based on (molecular data?).
• Large Ovalipes catharus tend to feed less frequently but generally on algae as well as on larger animals s – Can't quite follow. They feed less frequently in general? Or they feed infrequently on algae and frequently on animals? "Frequently but generally" confuses me.
• Ovalipes catharus does not appear to be typically parasitised by nematodes or barnacles.[86] Instead, the overwhelming majority of them – A bit confusing, needed to read several times. I think the general advice applies: State the most important facts first (here, Triticella capsularis), then add the details/secundary info (the parasites that don't apply to this species).
• through vigorous waving of the female's body, which disturbs their egg cases and causes them to break out.[98] Females generally release their larvae at night. – How females release their larvae should come later in the text, after the more general information, no?
• How many batches of eggs does a female produce per season?
• The zip is accompanied by what may be a courtship display whereby the crab "walks forward and flicks both swimming paddles in a twisting motion." – I recommend to rephrase this in your own words; I don't see why this should be quoted. Also, if you quote, you would have to state the author of that quote in-text according to the WP guidelines, I believe.
• The females of a group – what "group"? Are they gregarious?
• In one example, male crabs that had not cannibalised females readily accepted food, while those that had engaged in cannibalism rarely did. – Ok, it does not accept food because it just ate, but what's the point?
• Males of O. catharus sometimes practice sexual cannibalism toward females.[13] This occurs when the female is soft-shelled and therefore vulnerable after moulting.[13] Male crabs generally protect the females during mating, but afterward, the female is vulnerable to cannibalism by other males or, less commonly, by her partner – "Secual cannibalism" is cannibalism between mating partners, right? But the text goes on to talk about cannibalism by other males, which is confusing.
• The crabs are known to be a traditional food source – do we really need the "known to be" here?
• There is a huge box in the talk page ("The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future") – has this been resolved, can it be removed?
• Hope this helps. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 03:50, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry this response isn't in the correct order: the order itself didn't seem relevant, and I didn't feel like sorting it.

• I think that these terms would benefit from such an in-text explanation: chelipeds, dactyli, fingers (what does it mean in the context of crabs?), isometric, osmoconformer/osmoregulator, stenotherm, Phosphorylation of ADP[, and proximal].
  • I've just eliminated the use of "isometric", because I agree it didn't really add anything. I've also given a brief description of 'stenotherm', because I agree it's trivial to explain inline. I've now added that the chelipeds are the "front legs" and informally called the chela "pincers" before introducing proper terminology in en-dashes or parentheses. Lastly, I've explained what the dactyli are in en-dashes. All of these I think cater to the casual reader without harming the experience of a serious reader. The next two points will be justifications for ones I disagree with you on.
  • Starting with 'Internal anatomy', I heavily disagree with most of this. In an 'Internal anatomy' section for a crab, there's some expectation that anatomical terminology will be used as needed; as noted in WP:MTAU, the lead should always be as accessible as possible, but some sections beyond that simply can't trip over themselves to explain every bit of terminology without losing their usefulness: "Wikipedia strives to be a serious reference resource, and highly technical subject matter still belongs in some Wikipedia articles. Increasing the understandability of technical content is intended to be an improvement to the article for the benefit of the less knowledgeable readers, but this should be done without reducing the value to readers with more technical background." Plenty of our coverage of internal anatomy is inherently rooted in wikilinking to terminology, for example (I couldn't find any recent anatomy FAs): pancreas, lung, gallbladder, etc. If you take a look at our definition of osmoregulation, that's about as basic as it gets, and that already includes terminology like "osmotic pressure". The part about "phosphorylation of ADP" (something which, to my recollection, is already high school biology) is already a significant reduction from the jargon present in the paper which talks in-depth about RCR-1 ratios; that is, this is already significantly over-explained solely for accessibility, and it would effectively be a coatrack within a coatrack to try to explain this process.
  • Regarding external anatomy, "fingers" in the context of a crab means both the dactylus (movable, top) and the fixed finger (immobile, bottom); I think this should be clear, however, through basic context clues (we're talking about the pincer, everyone already knows "fingers" are those appendages on the tips of our hands, and we say "both"). What I've just given is the most barebones definition of what the fingers are, and so stopping to explain it would be a rhetorical brick wall. Likewise, a "rearward" tooth is simplified to the point where people using this as a serious resource now need to figure out what we mean by "rearward", reducing its value from "proximal" which is precisely understood.
• The "Taxonomy" and "Diet" sections seem to be shorter and less specific than other sections (particularly the description section).
  • The 'Taxonomy' section is short because that really is the extent of relevant taxonomic information I could find on O. catharus. Wear & Haddon 1987, Davidson 1986, and Davidson 1987 (master's thesis) are the only sources that really cover the diet as original research (and Davidson 1986 is mostly very niche information about how it selects mussels; I'll re-read it and see if there's anything else worth including). I think we adequately cover the relevant information in Wear & Haddon 1987, and Davidson 1987 inherently has a ton of overlap with Davidson 1986. It never hurts to double-check, though, and so I'll also re-read Wear & Haddon 1987. The 'Description' section is so long simply because there's a lot of relevant information from a comparatively wide variety of sources.

Looking at Wear & Haddon 1987, you cover the very basics, but there are specific details in their that readers might enjoy learning, for example that the bivalves it eats are usually very small (< 3–4 mm), and that the gut often contains remains from more than 100 individual bivales, and similar details. Not absolutely necessary to include such things, but there would be potential to further expand that section. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• The Diet section contains some general statements that are already covered in much greater detail in the "Description" (maybe it is worth to move those discussions down to "Diet")?
  • The only statements that overlap between 'Description' and 'Diet' are six words casually mentioning what the claws are used for (lit. "used for cutting" and "used for crushing") and a sentence about how its stenothermism applies to its eating habits (which is relevant to its internal digestive anatomy). Sometimes these tiny nuggets of information inherently overlap in different sections. I think enforcing a strict dichotomy here only hurts the reading experience.

Ok.

• Maybe rename the section to the more general "Feeding"?
  • I think 'Diet' is substantially more clearly understood, applicable, and widely used than 'Feeding'. I don't think it should be changed, but if it is, I think "Diet and foraging [behavior]" would be most appropriate.

Ok. I thought that "feeding" would be more inclusive, also covering feeding habits, while "diet" is only about the contents. But I'm fine with that. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Upon further consideration, I think I am happy going with 'Diet and foraging', since the second paragraph is explicitly about how they obtain the food rather than the food itself. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 01:01, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Here you address the species in plural, elsewhere you use singular. That should be consistent (I think the convention is to use singular when talking about the species).
  • Yeah, in hindsight, I kind of just used "vibes" to determine when it would be plural and when it would be singular (for example, trying to describe it as singular for an anatomical description but pluralistically as a population). I'll have a go at singularizing it. This is probably the biggest extant flaw with the article.
• The "Taxonomy" should have a little bit on the classification of Ovalipes itself.
  • I thought about expanding this footnote out into the prose, but I didn't know if it'd be seen as too superfluous. I could expand it out, but I think a second opinion or a concrete argument is warranted here before changing it.

In other FAs, we usually provide a little bit about the family level for context. Maybe one general sentence about the family is something to think about. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Also, it does not seem there is consensus that Ovalipes sits within Ovalipidae, as this study ([1]) proposes something else.
  • I think a single study contending that doesn't count as WP:DUE weight in what's already a minor explanatory footnote. This might later turn out to be correct, and it might deserve a mention in Ovalipidae, but all existing reliable sources I can find from 2018–2024 except this one by a single author place Ovalipes squarely within Ovalipidae (this includes WoRMS, extremely prolific carcinologists like G.C.B. Poore, S.T. Ahyong, and multiple peer-reviewed papers since Evans 2018). There's more than enough consensus for the purposes of the footnote, to my mind.

Ok if this is only a single opinion and the classification within Ovalipidae is still consensus. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• What is the "posterior border"? Doesn't that depend on posture?
  • The posterior border is the one facing the crab's cephalothorax if its chelipeds are parallel. However, while I know that from prior reading and can show that via several images such as this one, I feel replacing the terminology "posterior border" with something like this (which would itself sound bloated and awkward) strays too far into WP:OR.

OK.

• "also uncommon" somehow implies they are uncommon in New Zealand.
  • I've made it clearer.
• "a butterfly-shaped mark" – remove the link to "butterfly"? It does not help I think.
  • I can see it from the perspective of it being tangential; removed.
• A bit confusing, needed to read several times.
  • I'm trying but completely failing to see the confusion.

Confusion is here: You talk about parasites, then in the next two sentences introduce a symbiont, and after that talk about parasites again. I think it would be better to keep both categories separated. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see what you mean now. Similar to the carapace -> color -> carapace situation. I'll try to separate this out; I genuinely didn't see this. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 01:03, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• as a form of signalling – link to Animal communication?
  • I actually 100% forgot to link to signalling theory on this one!
• Is "hairy" refering to setae, too, or are these different structures?
  • Nah, and I agree it could be clearer. I would say "hirsute" which technically flows better but is something 95% of readers would need to look up; I'll try workshopping this one, because even though I'm not sure what I could do better, it feels wrong.

I see. A wikilink seems to be missing. You could still just gloss it, e.g. "the antennae is somewhat hirsute ("hairy")" or similar. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• I suggest to switch the order. Discuss the color (including the white underside, too), and then the carapace shape, or vice versa, but not carapace -> color -> carapace -> color as it is currently.
  • Fantastic call, and I've done something similar: carapace shape -> color.
• Can we add the etymology of "catharus".
  • Unfortunately, no. I really tried here. I mentioned this Talk:Ovalipes catharus#Etymology and discussed something similar here, but there's no concrete, reliable information that this is based on "καθαρός", and it'd therefore be WP:OR to do so.

Ok.

• Maybe there is something more to add on the research history? Circumstances of the 1843 description maybe? For example, was the description based on life specimens, or based on a collected one (holotype collected where?)
  • If you take a look at p. 265 of the source, you'll note there unfortunately really isn't anything there that isn't already addressed better in Stephenson & Rees 1968; functionally the only unique things it says are that it's called the "common crab" (I could find no other sources on this) and that it was collected by Andrew Sinclair and sent to the British Museum (seems too extraneous to the taxonomy).

Information like that (collected by Andrew Sinclair and sent to the British Museum) is what we usually include in other FAs, and I personally find such information quite interesting, but I won't insist of course. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• but it may exhibit negative allometry in males – add "(grows more slowely)"
  • "Grows more slowly" is essentially correct, but this phrasing to me implies that the growth just "takes longer" but eventually catches up at some point. I've added in parentheses "grow proportionally smaller".
• How many batches of eggs does a female produce per season?
  • My understanding of this is somewhat limited because I only corrected 'Mating and reproduction' rather than researching it fully, but the female is only inseminated once per season. Thus, the second section of 'Mating and reproduction' should apply here.
• It would help to add a bit of context here; what does it mean to reverse the ventilatory flow, and why are they doing that?
  • Since the paper addresses it, I've added the presumed reason for the reversed direction, and I've added "reverse the direction" for clarity. However, explaining the breathing process to give an understanding of what ventilatory flow is is likely more suited to decapod anatomy. Similar to above, there's only so much we can do for a reader choosing to read about a species of crab's internal anatomy without sacrificing quality as a serious resource.

Perfect now. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• When O. punctatus is a synonym, why is that one still listed and appears as a separate species in the cladogram?
  • O. catharus and others were synonymised with O. punctatus, but that doesn't mean O. punctatus doesn't exist; it's just that O. catharus and others weren't identified as their own separate species from O. punctatus until 1968. You might be thinking of e.g. a junior synonym which completely obsoletes one of the taxa. It's the terminology Stephenson & Rees 1968 use, and I think it's the most elegant.

Per my comment above (Taxonomy is quite short), I personally think this is better spelled out. O. catharus was synonymised, by whom? When? And did subsequent publications simply not follow this synonymisation, or was the species re-established as a separate species at some point? Again, I am not insisting here if you really want to keep the taxonomy very short, but I found this synonymisation info a bit confusing without further context. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• the "relative" is redundant here, I propose to remove it.
  • I don't see this as redundant; the "relative length" is what's diminishing, and that's qualified with "compared to the length" (just "with respect to the length" but less verbose).

I thought you wouldn't loose anything if you just skip the first "relative"; e.g. "the length decreases relative to the width", but yeah, I guess your version works too. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• I recommend to rephrase this in your own words; I don't see why this should be quoted.
  • I'm not sure this specific series of actions can be paraphrased without making it extraordinarily awkward, potentially inaccurate, less informative, or all three. If the article covered this ritual more, then I could probably formulate something, but right now, this is literally all the article gives on the choreography.
• Also, if you quote, you would have to state the author of that quote in-text according to the WP guidelines, I believe.
  • Not true to my understanding per MOS:QUOTE. The direct inline citation is enough.

Ok.

• "Hands"? Are these the pincers?
  • Pretty much certainly, as that's how I've always seem this terminology used. I just didn't want to overstep into WP:OR by accident, but I can change it (unlike "posterior border" above, this one is probably common and understandable enough that I can translate with minimal OR).

Yes, always use the same term when referring to the same thing, otherwise readers will assume that you are talking about something else. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• "Frequently but generally" confuses me.
  • Yeah, I think the "but" was corrupting the readability of that sentence. I've lightly altered it to significantly aid comprehension.
• That does not belong under "Taxonomy" I think.
  • I was debating putting this in 'Description', 'Taxonomy', or splitting it between the two. I figured it was relevant to 'Taxonomy' because of the genetic isolation, but I agree in hindsight that it should be bumped up to the more relevant part about lifespans; done.
• The following cladogram – It would help to date this (e.g., "from a 1998 study") and indicate on what it is based on (molecular data?).
  • The "from a 1998 study" is inherently part of the footnote system that we use. There's really nothing that stands out to me about this specific piece of information that makes that redundancy useful; that's generally reserved for exceptional claims predicated on a single source, and I don't think this is especially exceptional. If this is about the paper being 26 years old, no new species have been added since this was published, and I've seen no evidence that it's become outdated or superseded. Thus, I don't think we need to qualify it based on the date (and if we did, we probably ought to not be using it anyway). However, I agree with your second point, especially because it's based on morphological rather than molecular; fixed.

In other FAC discussions, "it's in the footnote citation so we don't have to include it in-text" has been a weak argument, as we don't want the reader to chase links for such information. I personally think that, especially for cladograms, which become outdated very quickly, the year does matter, especially as "1998" is quite old. Again, I won't insist since the point is minor. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• "Sexual cannibalism" is cannibalism between mating partners, right? But the text goes on to talk about cannibalism by other males, which is confusing.
  • We do talk about cannibalization by her partner, but I agree it's treated as an afterthought in the next sentence. I've flipped the sentence and hopefully fixed that.
• The crabs are known to be a traditional food source – do we really need the "known to be" here?
  • I see where you're coming from, but I think this nicely complements the second half of the sentence which reads "but researchers in the early Colonial period did not record much about harvesting traditions" (i.e. "we know some basic things, but not a lot").
• This section has much stuff that's not anatomy, including the paragraph on biochemistry.
  • I don't fully see eye-to-eye on this. The first paragraph is about its respiration and how it works morphologically, the second is about the heart and circulation, the third (which I guess by a strict definition of "anatomy" could prompt a change to "Internal biology" or "Physiology") is about the functioning of its heart, respiration, and digestion in response to temperature, and the fourth is about both its mechanism for hearing as well as poorly understood (but still present) internal structures which produce sound. I've renamed the subsection to "Physiology and internal anatomy" to be more accurate with respect to the third paragraph. I've also moved it to its own section since it being in 'Description' has kind of been nagging at me anyway.

OK. Note that in other FAs, we often group sections like "Diet" and "Predators" in a "Biology and Ecology" section, and "Physiology" tends to be part of that, rather than description. But ok. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• How females release their larvae should come later in the text, after the more general information, no?
  • Agreed, and I think it reads better this way too; changed.
• What "group"? Are they gregarious?
  • I've changed this to "the females in an area" because I agree the source doesn't specifically define what a "group" here is except as the females in a specific area (I may have to check other sources to see if there's more information on that).
• There is a huge box in the talk page ("The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future") – has this been resolved, can it be removed?
  • Please see one of the disclaimers of this nom. I put all of those there (this is the template {{refideas}}), and they're there because someone more clever or knowledgeable than me might be able to incorporate them without being extraneous, but I don't know how to do that. Good to have them around, in my opinion. If you've never used this template, I highly recommend it. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 02:10, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ok.

• @TheTechnician27:: Thanks. See a few replies from me below yours above. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 00:36, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  @Jens Lallensack: I've since fixed several issues (including ones I initially didn't see as issues). I've also greatly remixed the 'Mating and reproduction' section after going down a bit of a rabbit hole; I think it's a lot more comprehensible now. I really appreciate you giving such detailed feedback, because I know how much time this level of scrutiny takes. I think for right now, I'm satisfied with how I've responded to these points, but I'm going to continually revisit any I haven't addressed to see if more editing has changed my thoughts on them. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 19:04, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, looks good to me now. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 21:13, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• "Ovalipes catharus has an oval-shaped, streamlined, and slightly grainy carapace with five large teeth to either side of the eyes and four teeth at the front.[1][14][20] The carapace has two large, maroon eye-spots at the rear". This is confusing. You start with the carapace, then go on to the eyes and teeth and go back to the carapace. I think you need to keep the carapace together and explain the eyes and teeth more clearly.
• "It is overall sandy grey with orange-red highlights and dotted with small, brown spots.[1][23] Its underside is white, and its rear legs – which are flattened and function as swimming paddles – have a purplish tinge." This is unclear. The first "It" appears to refer to the carapace so grammatically so should "Its" in the second sentence, but it appears to be about the whole animal.
• What is meant by "carapace teeth"?
• "It has a long period of larval development – about two months". Long compared with what?
• What is a megalopa? Is there an article you can link to?
• "similarly to the otolith in vertebrates.[62] They are known to be able". "They" grammatically refers to vertebrates.
• "Ovalipes catharus is colloquially known as the paddle crab, the common swimming crab,[7] or Māori: pāpaka.[8] They were described". You switch between singualr and plural. You should stick to one or the other.
• More to follow. Dudley Miles (talk) 12:57, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't start with the carapace and then go to the eyes and teeth. The carapace itself forms these teeth, which are shapes, not implements used for eating (see below). The eyespots are markings on the carapace. "The carapace has two large, maroon eyespots..." Thus, the first two sentences focus exclusively on the overall shape and distinguishing features of the carapace, akin to describing a circular sawblade as: "a metal disc with teeth around the outer edge and with a logo in the center". I've since wikilinked to 'eyespots' to avoid any confusion, as while these are very common features in nature to a point where I don't think they warrant an aside, I absolutely should have linked from the get-go.

• 1. Teeth of an animal normally means teeth in the literal sense, so I think you should add at first mention "(tooth-shaped projections)" to avoid confusion. 2. Are "eyes" in the first sentence eyes or eyespots? Dudley Miles (talk) 18:30, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• @Dudley Miles: Oooh, shoot, I'm sorry, I had a total brainfart and thought you were referring to how I went into detail about the eyespots in the second sentence, completely forgetting that I'd referenced the eyes in the first. (Nice to meet you; I'm stupid.) Yes, the eyes in the first sentence are the eyes themselves. However, I only use those as a frame of reference to where the teeth are for accessibility reasons (otherwise, I would use anterolateral). I think for 99% of readers, this gives a more intuitive description of the location, and for that 1% of researchers who can immediately intuit "anterolateral", "to either side of the eyes" doesn't meaningfully impact their experience (Wilkens & Ahyong, for example, describe them as "behind the eyes" (both descriptors are correct)). As for the teeth, "tooth-like projections" when I read it conjures a strong image of flattened human teeth, so I've just called them "sawtooth-like projections" instead. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 14:43, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Good call; fixed.
• "Teeth" are used in the sense of the teeth of a sawblade. For the anteriolateral ones (the five to either side of the eyes), you can see them in the first image in the infobox (top-down) and in the third image of the crab's face (front-on). I don't think it would be WP:OR if I said "sawblade-like teeth" because it's unambiguously reminiscent of them, but I also don't know if that could alleviate confusion.
• Long compared to other decapods; I've now specified, as yes, that was ambiguous. (Note this adjective isn't WP:OR; the authors writing a monograph on the life histories of Decapoda call the period "exceptionally long".)
• I didn't initially wikilink because I have a strong aversion to double-dipping into a single wikilink in quick succession (same article, and the section Crustacean larva#Post-larva follows two sentences after Crustacean larva#Zoea), but I think you're correct that this is a suitable edge case; fixed.
• Yeah, another case of singular versus plural (see below). However, this one is just unambiguously my fault because I didn't stick to my personal rule of 'singular no matter what for the description and anatomy'. Fixed.
• Yup. I've been trying to think of what to do here, because sometimes I just have to talk about them as a population rather than as a singular entity. Sometimes it sounds natural to refer to them as singular, sometimes equally natural as plural. I kind of hate it. Haha TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 14:39, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment @Jens Lallensack: @Dudley Miles: I've finally gone ahead and singularized pronouns for consistency. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 20:38, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• "in deeper waters, up to at least 700 m". "down" not "up".

• "Up to" doesn't imply "up" as in a positive direction on the vertical axis, but rather "up to" as in a limit (common English usage, arguably more common than the former). This would cause confusion with the prior sentence which uses "depths up to 100m", and I don't think it does that for any good reason (if anything, I think it reads less naturally and adds confusion). However, I changed the comma to an en-dash, since I think that reads more naturally in the context of a limit rather than a positive vertical distance.

• "up to at least" is clumsy and confusing. How about changing "can be found in deeper waters – up to at least 700 m (2,300 ft)" to "can be found at least 700 m (2,300 ft) deep"?

• Sounds good to me. Done.

• "to swim rapidly and catch faster prey". faster than what? Maybe "fast prey".

• Agreed; done.

• Dimorphic is an unusual word which should be linked or explained.

• I figured the part after the semicolon could function as a context clue, but now I see the situation where a reader just immediately gets hung up and goes to a dictionary before reading on. Done.

• "O. catharus appears to be largely unaffected by parasites present in Charybdis japonica". Why should a predator's parasites be relevant? This should be clarified, perhaps by moving the last sentence in the paragraph, "Ecologists...tolerance" above the parasites comment.

• This one's kind of difficult, because on the one hand, I want to keep the parasites and symbionts together, and rewriting it to accommodate for that would require flipping the entire paragraph in a way I don't think reads as naturally. I can say that Miller et al. spend an entire article documenting this, and C. japonica isn't just a predator: it's a pretty similar crab (it would be one of O. catharus' closest relatives in NZ), so it is at least of some note that its parasites are basically totally different. Not done yet, but I see your point, and I'll try flipping the paragraph and seeing if that's workable.

• "which lasts between 12 and 36 hours and even up to four days". "occasionally up to four days" seems better to me.

• Since Haddon 1994 says "generally 12 to 36", I agree this isn't WP:SYNTH. Done.

• "In one batch, a female crab produces between 82,000 and 683,000 eggs, but like in other crabs, a proportion of these are lost to disease, egg failure, and predation." This is over-cautiously worded as any animal which produces 1000s of eggs loses the vast majority, not just other crabs and not just a proportion.

• Absent specific information from an RS, I can't say without WP:OR how many of these are lost (Haddon 1994 refers to it as "a proportion", but of course it's the majority; no crab is successfully spawning 683,000 new crabs). However, I would argue the focus of this half of the sentence isn't on the specific amount that are lost as much as it is the means by which they're lost. It seems obvious that these three things happen, but that Haddon went out of his way to bring up this ostensibly "trivial" point in an article targeted at an expert audience makes me see it as worth including for a general one.

• "The crabs are known to be a traditional food source, but researchers in the early Colonial period did not record much about harvesting traditions." This implies but does nat state that are no longer harvested. This should be clarified.

• To me, this doesn't imply one way or the other if they're still harvested, but rather that the ways they were harvested weren't recorded. For example, we still make cookies, but absent contemporaneous documentation, the way these cookies were made in the 1700s may be lost. Unfortunately, this is the one resource in this entire article I have no access to. Prosperosity, who added this, only had temporary access via a rental. It isn't ideal, but I trust what they've written accurately reflects the source.

• How about simplifying with something like "The crabs are a traditional food source, but little is known about ancient harvesting traditions"?

• Apologies; I just now saw these two new comments. This FAC is a bit of a wall. These are Colonial-period harvesting traditions, not ancient ones, and we say "researchers in the early Colonial period did not record much about harvesting traditions". However, I like your idea about the first half of the sentence. Done accordingly, but I quite like the information in the second half of the sentence as it is.

• Did commercial catches decline because of over-fishing? If so, this should be explained. If not, the reason for the decline should be explained.

• Unfortunately, I could find no established reason for the decline. The master's thesis 'Investigating the socio-economic impacts of the introduced Asian paddle crab, Charybdis japonica, on New Zealand's native paddle crab fishery' tries to explore this, but section '4.7 Conclusions' indicates not even the experts know. The 2023 fisheries assessment further states: "For all PAD fishstocks there is insufficient information to estimate current stock status." I will however add that "The cause of this drop is unknown as of blah blah" or "the cause of this decline is not well-understood" (I'm thinking the latter).

• "In 1984, research was conducted into exporting to the United States, which had previously failed due to spoilage and lack of market interest." I am not sure that this is worth mentioning, but if it is covered then the results of the research should also be explained. Dudley Miles (talk) 14:33, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Unfortunately, I've been unable to find what actually came of this research. The closest I was able to find to Murray 1984 is a mention in Osborne 1987 that "a trial paddle crab farm began [...] with the aim of producing soft-shelled crabs for markets in the U.S.A." Of course the presumable answer is "it was unsuccessful" because I can't find any evidence the US imports these, but that's WP:OR. I mention it in a footnote because the fact they were previously imported to the US would be notable enough to include in the prose were I able to follow it up with what eventually happened to it, but absent that, I feel it's still worth mentioning, just outside of the main prose. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 15:38, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Dudley, how is this one looking? Gog the Mild (talk) 19:51, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In my last post I made two suggestions which the nominator does not appear to have commented on. Dudley Miles (talk) 21:42, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, Dudley Miles, sorry for not getting back to these; I completely missed them. One of your suggestions I implemented fully, the other partially for reasons I explain. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 01:47, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• One further point. You have changed the first use of teeth to sawtooth-like projections, but thereafter you refer several times to teeth, and it may not be clear to readers that they are the same. I think you need to clarify, although I am not sure of the best way to deal with it - maybe change all teeth to sawtooth-like projections. Dudley Miles (talk) 10:09, 11 January 2025 (UTC)′[reply]

• While I understand what you're getting at, there are four more times "teeth"/"tooth" are referred to in the article. The first comes just a couple sentences (same paragraph) after "sawtooth-like projections" described at the front sides of the carapace, and I call them "carapace teeth", not just "teeth"; I think a reader should understand what's being referred to since it's very recently been established the carapace has these (that, and it'd already be quite weird for a carapace to have a mouth). The second usage is "conical teeth on both fingers [of the minor chela]", and the third is "large proximal tooth used for crushing [on the major chela]". Here, I can't imagine someone confusing this with the calcified mouth structure in vertebrates or thinking that this crab has a mouth on each hand. "Teeth" is overall not uncommon in English for describing these structures, e.g. comb teeth, gear teeth, saw teeth. Finally, footnote (f) refers to them as teeth, but to me that easily crosses the line into WP:OR; unlike the first instance where this is something most readers can trivially confirm by just looking at the infobox image, the burden of the reader to verify "sawtooth-like" for the group is to go find dorsal images of six different crabs, two of which we don't even have on Wikipedia. Basically, I think the first time is good to avoid confusion, but after that, it becomes disruptively verbose for a problem I think shouldn't exist for the other four usages (or, in the case where it isn't, it's too far into WP:OR). TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 14:26, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I am not convinced on the last point, but it is not a deal-breaker. Dudley Miles (talk) 14:58, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• "or Māori: pāpaka" should be "or, in Maori, pāpaka", both in the lead and body.

• I think the current way is the correct way to use {{lang}}, but I could be mistaken.

• Don't think crab needs to be linked.

• I don't see any reason not to link 'crab'; it's standard practice to wikilink even common things when they represent the type of thing a subject is. (Ex. linking 'United States' within the first sentence of articles on US states; linking to 'dog' for the article 'terrier'; linking to 'smartphone' for the article 'iPhone'; linking to 'video game' for 'Super Mario Bros.')

• "sandy-bottomed waters" Are there any non-sandy-bottomed waters in the ocean? I'm not quite sure what habitat preference this implies, exactly.

• Yup! Seafloors are commonly thought of as just being "sand", but they can be large rocks, gravel, clay, and silt as well. I'm sure I'm missing other materials, but the crabs specifically prefer sand for burying and thus really only live where sand is.

• Every sentence in the first para starts with It, this gets kind of repetitive.

• Added in a "the crab's" to spice things up a bit, because I agree.

• "which comprises over a quarter of its diet" cannibalism doesn't comprise any of its diet.

• Correct; changed to "accounts for", since cannibalism isn't a thing you eat.

• "could become outcompeted" to "could be outcompeted"?

• The reason I say "could become" instead of "could be" is because "could be" to me reads as though this is something that has already happened, as in C. japonica is already currently outcompeting O. catharus, which seems not to be the case yet.

• "is present in Māori culture, both as an artistic motif" I'd personally reword to "is used in Māori culture as an artistic motif..."

• I don't think it's wrong to change it, but I just like the cadence of the sentence with a bit of a "breather" caused by the comma.

• There are a lot of duplinks in the body.

• Do you have any specific ones in mind? I'm using the standard way of duplicate linking wherein the lead is treated separately from the rest of the body. I did just fix two unnecessary dupes, though, that I totally missed before.

• Gloss for cervical.

• Link to neck? I'll do that, but readers might be a bit confused given our coverage of necks is so human-centric (let alone anything outside of tetrapods). Else I can link to Wiktionary, although I prefer to link "in-house" when possible.

• "– the chelipeds –" "the" is unnecessary

• I see what you mean, but I think using "the" works better with sentence flow and is more easily read than just "chelipeds" within en-dashes. I can't exactly describe it.

• More later. AryKun (talk) 15:00, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Much appreciated! TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 19:44, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Just a drive-by comment; for neck, maybe link to Neck#Other animals? RoySmith (talk) 02:24, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Good point. I was between that or just a regular link since "cervix" is only explained there, but I think linking to the lead might be more confusing due to the human-centrism. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 02:28, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, AryKun. I'm checking back in to see if you wish to continue your review once you return from your wikibreak. As this is probably the only time for a long time this article will receive this much scrutiny from anyone but me, it would be majorly appreciated, but of course no pressure. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 01:07, 17 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For the moment, just some random comments, which may or may not evolve into a full review.

• Unlike about half of known Ovalipes species, however, it exhibits no iridescence as a form of signalling. This is a strangely worded sentence. It's not clear what "no" modifies. Is it "iridescence" or "iridescence as a form of signalling"? I've tried a few variation, but haven't hit up a better wording, unfortunately. In any case, I'd drop the "known", since were obviously not comparing it to unknown species.

• I've changed this to "does not exhibit", which I think sounds much better than what was there before. I'd actually be fine with the hedging here, but my problem isn't with the hedging itself as much as it is that 1) it's inconsistently used and 2) using it consistently would destroy the cadence of the other applicable sentences, so done.

• carapace widths up to a reported 150 mm do you need to say "reported". That should go without saying, since if it's not reported, we don't know about it.

• Good point. Done.

• within a four-day window of her moult I'm guessing that means "up to four days after moulting". Or does it mean "From two days before to two days after"? This should be clarified.

• Good point. Done.

• females have been observed to produce up to four or five without re-mating I assume that means "four or five batches", not "four or five eggs"? I know this is clarified in the next sentence, but it would be better to make it clear up front.

• This is clarified in the current sentence too. "It is not known how many egg batches [...] up to four or five"; there's no ambiguity that "egg batches" is what's being referenced.

• produces ... 683,000 eggs That's a surprisingly precise number, and regardless of what the source may say, such precision is almost certainly unwarranted.

• I've rounded to the nearest 10,000, so it's now "between around 80,000 and 680,000". I think further rounding risks substantial inaccuracy, but this round is within around a couple percent.

• There's still a problem. It's not so much the number of digits in the number, but that you've taken the results of one study which looked at 30 specimens from a single location and extrapolated this to a global statement about the species as a whole. Looking at the abstract and results sections of Haddon 1994, I'd suggest something like "In one batch, a female crab produces about 500,000 eggs; one study reported a range of 82,000 to 683,000".

• Note that the 500,000 figure is even based on a smaller sample size than the overall study, because it only focuses on large females of ~100mm (highly correlated with carapace width). I still agree with adding the 500,000 figure, though, of course; that's a good idea. As often as I can (absent very obvious extenuating circumstances), I try not to get meta and say "one study said x and y" for reasons I've just been inspired start writing an essay about. (I've nonetheless rewritten this sentence to indicate that this is just the extent of current knowledge, not a hard-and-fast limit.) In this forthcoming essay, I posit that there are four main kinds of readers and that one of the main reasons Wikipedia works so well is because this experience is so seamless for all 4. I then argue that, while this kind of meta-language fails to help 3 of 4 whatsoever, I feel it actively hurts the reading experience of the fourth one by violating that seamlessness. I describe "study said blah" as almost a cousin of MOS:NOTE, where it directly pulls this class of reader out of the encyclopedia and into the exact things they come to an encyclopedia to avoid like a lecture/essay/thesis/journal article. But that's for then; I think right now, I'm happy with how I've changed the sentence, and with the 500,000 suggestion, you've helped me fix an additional issue that's been nagging at me.

• which disturbs their egg cases and causes them to break out Clarify what "them" refers to. Is it the larvae breaking out of the eggs or the egg cases breaking out of whatever they're packaged in?

• Good point; although technically "them" "the larvae" because of the previous uses of "they" and "their" if this is being read formally, a reader could mistake this as a commonplace grammar mistake where I switch pronoun subject mid-sentence. That said, I have no idea how to work around this, and I see it as a pretty small likelihood. If there's a way to do this elegantly, I'm on-board, but otherwise, I have serious doubts the tradeoff is worth it, because I see this as an exceedingly minor and unlikely problem. The only way I've thought of so far is ditching the pronoun mid-sentence (replace "them" with "the larvae"), which reads as distractingly incorrect even if technically it isn't "wrong".

• In total, a female paddle crab can produce up to an estimated 10 batches in a lifetime over the course of four breeding seasons If they can produce "four or five" batches (stated earlier in the paragraph) in one mating, and they breed for four seasons, the math doesn't add up here.

• Page 128 of Osborne 1987 (cited) goes into more depth about this, but the 10 batches figure is a result of constraints other than just the absolute maximum batches per insemination that's ever been observed in a lab; namely it's more about what's plausible than something theoretically possible but extremely unlikely. You can see this in how they say one or two broods for the first season and then two or three for the following three; technically that's a max of 11, but they seem to not see that as plausible. Osborne 1987 is also the source on the upper bound for four batches (Haddon & Wear 1993 is the source for five), and thus I trust that the 10 estimate does not contradict the four/five maximum per insemination one. I'm going to air on the side of WP:VNT here and trust the expert instead of trying to inject my own commentary in the form of hedging in the prose or an evidence board-esque footnote.

• The amount of paddle crabs landed generally increased "amount" seems like an odd word here. Maybe "number" would work better?

• Amount is just "the total, aggregate or sum of material", which I think is exactly how the word is being used here. "Number" correlates heavily with mass (being functionally the same thing at this amount assuming the crabs are normally distributed), but that isn't the metric being used here; it's tonnage. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 02:54, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• How about "The size of the harvest has generally increased..."? RoySmith (talk) 14:00, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• This reads as both confusing and more awkward to me, and it could additionally connote that the crabs themselves have gotten bigger. I really see nothing at all wrong with "amount of"; an "amount of" something is extremely standard English and seems to unambiguously apply here. However, to cut down on verbosity and I think improve cadence, I've changed "The amount of paddle crabs landed" to "Paddle crab landings". TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 05:06, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'll just add a personal view vis-a-vis Jens Lallensack's WP:MTAU comment. I'm scientifically literate, but far from an expert on marine biology; for an article of this nature, I think I'm a good example of the kind of reader WP:AUDIENCE is talking about. Looking at the differences between before Jen's review and now, I think the improvements you made were spot-on. A lot of these terms made no sense to me beyond obviously being some weird invertibrate body part, and the short descriptions you added go a long way towards increasing readability. I think a term like "osmoregulator" is fine the way it is; anybody who took high-school chemistry should be able to guess that's got something to do with salt concentrations, and they can click the link for more details if they want. RoySmith (talk) 14:18, 7 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Gog the Mild in response to your coordinator note, I'll go out on a limb and call this a support from me, if for no other reason than to keep it from getting archived too soon. I'm not qualified to comment on the scientific aspects such as comprehensiveness or the quality of the research but overall the prose is well written and easy to read and, as mentioned above, aims at the right level to satisfy WP:AUDIENCE for a scientific article. I'll just add one more note, regarding File:Ovalipes catharus swimming in water.jpg. It's not a great image and I don't think it adds much vis-a-vis showing how the paddle-legs work. If there was a better quality image that could replace it, that would be an improvement, but if that's the best we've got, it's not a blocker. RoySmith (talk) 22:14, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad someone brought up the images, because I have thoughts. Unfortunately, yeah, this was the literal only image I was able to find anywhere of the swimming crab performing its titular action. With its ability to swim with its paddles being one of its most recognizable traits, I felt this would be a glaring omission. That said, it's not quite as bad as I'd initially thought before thorough research, just pretty alright: while I wish it were closer to the frame, it's a surprisingly clear image given how quickly Ovalipes move their paddles (yes, this video is extremely weird). There are ways that some of the media used in this article falls short, but I believe it to be the best possible use of what we have. I don't think any of it is bad, and I think the frontal image and the burrowing gif are quite fantastic. Ideally:

• The Paphies image should show O. catharus breaking open a mollusc (but this would be a hard shot to get outside a laboratory setting).
• The ventral image should be a plate instead of a dead specimen sprinkled with sand (this is probably near the best ventral shot you're likely to get in the field).
• The dorsal plate should be of a specimen which hasn't lost its color from preservation (like the one we use for Ovalipes australiensis; Shane T. Ahyong owns the non-commercial CC all rights reserved license to the only good one of these I know).
• The swimming image should be a video file. I think this is probably near as good as you're going to realistically get with a still image.
• Even though it'd be cool if the Little Akaloa image featured the crabs on the beach, it seems implausible because of how they're burrowed underwater during the day; I think this one's fine.
• We should have an image of O. catharus either being fished or (imo, preferably) prominently featured in a piece of Māori artwork. (This was the only artwork I've been able to find, and it's good, but it's not Māori.)

I'm going to do one more sweep, because it's not impossible I've missed something for any one of these, but it seems exceedingly unlikely until some Good Samaritan posts one of these unicorn images to iNaturalist or a museum posts a new image. The only one I can plausibly try is asking Dr. Ahyong about the dorsal image, but as he's already licensed it as NC ARR, this seems potentially disrespectful and like something he consciously didn't want to do. I think it would fall outside the scope of criterion 3 of a FA, but I could still do it if more experienced editors than myself think that's a good idea, because all I want is to improve the article. Otherwise, the existing non-commercially licensed images still wouldn't resolve any of this if they could be used. (PS: I hugely appreciate you getting back so quickly to GtM's concern about FAC stalling.) TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 00:42, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I found https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/79430112 which shows the rear legs perfectly. It's not licensed in a way we can use, but I'm not shy about this stuff, so I've written to the observer who took the photo requesting that they relicense it as CC-BY-SA. I'll let you know if I get any response. I did point out to them that their page on the species (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/144096-Ovalipes-catharus) is basically our article copy-pasted, so I didn't feel too bad about trying to twist their arm a bit on the image. RoySmith (talk) 02:34, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd completely forgotten about the 'all rights reserved' one from Daan Hoffmann; absolutely agreed it would be a fantastic image for the infobox. Of note is that that's not "basically our article copy-pasted"; that is our article verbatim and credited to us because our work is licensed under BY-SA, and iNaturalist is a crowd-sourced site where Daan Hoffmann has nothing to do with that 'About' page. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 03:32, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I also see https://portphillipmarinelife.net.au/species/5500, but I guess that's the same one that you're referring to above. RoySmith (talk) 02:36, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, this is the Ahyong plate (I wasn't aware it was 'all rights reserved' and not just noncommercial; my mistake). It's great just like the Hoffmann one is, but unlike something like BY-NC-SA -> BY-SA, all rights reserved -> BY-SA is going to be a longshot. Not impossible, but it indicates that the artists consciously decided against free licensing the first go-round. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 03:32, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe. I just checked my own images on iNaturalist, for example https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/155601746. They're all CC-BY-NC, but that's mostly because that seems to be the default and I never bothered to override it. Many of those images I've also uploaded to commons, and if somebody asked me specifically for one that wasn't on commons, I'd be happy to oblige. It never hurts to ask. The worst that can happen is they turn you down. RoySmith (talk) 03:51, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@TheTechnician27 so it turns out that Dean Hoffman was "more than happy" to have his image used, and has updated the license statement at https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/79430112 to CC-BY-SA-4.0. So, go grab it! RoySmith (talk) 02:30, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

NO. SHOT?? Oh my gosh, I'm ecstatic, and you just got a barnstar. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 02:52, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Shouldn't the metric tonnes be converted into avoirdupois tons instead of pounds? 37,000 lbs isn't a very useful measurement for a reader. Traumnovelle (talk) 21:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The problem I see arising with using (I assume you mean) short tons compared to pounds is that 99.9% of people in the US (possibly an undercount) don't know what a 'short ton' is, only knowing it as a 'ton'. Everyone in the US knows what a pound is, and around 1 million pounds or less is still, I think, within the range of comprehensibility (especially because the main point is the comparison between 1.1 million and 37k). Far and away the main reason we use these conversions is to aid comprehension for people in the US (sure, the UK and Canada aren't fully converted over, but it's nothing like the US), and I feel using 'short tons' is more confusing for the overwhelming majority of them. If I weren't a complete nerd going against the grain to metrify things in my everyday life, I would see 'short tons' and have to go look up what that is. Anyone who wants short tons from pounds, meanwhile, is able to chop three digits off the right and divide by two, which is a trivial operation. That is, I consider 37,000 lbs to be more useful than: "What on Earth is a short ton?" -> [plug that into a search engine] -> [click on Wikipedia article] -> [read first sentence] -> "Oh, it's just another name for a 'ton'!" -> [back over to Ovalipes catharus]. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 01:37, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Would a stone be better then? Traumnovelle (talk) 01:52, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Perhaps a henway? RoySmith (talk) 01:54, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Hey, Traumnovelle and RoySmith. I know this is rather late, but I found out about a nifty feature of the 'Convert' template from another article, namely that you can target multiple units at once for the conversion. Thus, I've converted it to both short tons and pounds; the people who know what a 'short ton' is can get a comparison in smaller units commensurate with the metric ton, but those who don't know what a 'short ton' is (which I still estimate to be a lot of Americans) can still fall back on pounds. :) TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 00:47, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to note.... when you cite 2 or more pages using {{sfn}} citations, you should use "pp." as the parameter instead of "p." (which refers to a single page, and pp. for a range). Alexeyevitch^(talk) 09:08, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Completely correct; totally forgot. Done. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 18:19, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A wall of comments but with just the one declaration of support. It feels more like a PR than a FAC. There still seems a way to go to achieve any consensus to promote and unless that starts to form within two or three days this nomination is liable to be archived. Gog the Mild (talk) 19:56, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've likewise been worried about stalling but haven't directly prompted for a vote out of fear of pressuring anyone or curtailing discussion (not sure what's considered proper etiquette). So far, of the major reviewers, Jens and Roy have both voiced support, Dudley seemed potentially willing to give a vote one way or the other except that I missed and therefore failed to address two of their comments (sorryyyyyy), Generalissima seemed done with their review but may not have read what I've addressed, and and AK seems to still have more feedback left to give. If consensus is murky after Dudley, Generalissima, and AK have finished their reviews, Prosperosity miiiight be willing to do a review out of their subject matter interest and experience (although if I actively called on them, I'd definitely give them an IOU for how much work a review takes. Haha). I'd love to see Alexeyevitch take a crack at this (again from their experience working on NZ taxa articles), but I recognize it's a lot of work. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 02:26, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Gog, checking in three days later just to see if you feel comfortable that things have gotten moving quickly enough. I think they are, but I wasn't conscientious enough of that aspect before and want to do my due dilligence going forward. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 04:27, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to be ticking along nicely. I have just advertised for source and image reviewers. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:34, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Gog! For any prospective image reviewers, I'll try to justify each image's copyright, appropriateness, and caption in order of where they appear to keep things moving along (all images have alt text, which I won't address here; for each of these, I've done fairly extensive research to track down possible alternatives):

• The first image is sourced from iNaturalist under a CC BY-SA license. A dorsal plate of a crab should always be the first image in the infobox as a standardized way to convey a bunch of important information about the crab's appearance. The carapace is fractured, but only one other such plate exists that I know of, which is licensed as all rights reserved by Shane T. Ahyong. This shows the parts of the crab most people are likely to see, including the dorsal carapace, chelipeds, walking legs, paddles, eyes, and antennae.
• The second image is sourced from iNaturalist under a CC0 license. For crabs, I believe there should always be a dorsal and a ventral view in the infobox whenever possible, as their unique shape positions them extremely well to show the most identifying parts of their body in just two images (kind of like showing the obverse and reverse of a coin).
• The range map was created by me using two source images (both listed on Commons); the first and most major one is CC0, while the second one (used for the Chatham Islands zoom) is CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported. Thus, I license my map under 3.0 (and would license it under 4.0; I'll reach out to TUBS to see if they're willing to port their work to 4.0). This sort of map is standard fare for a species, and it's supported by the inline sources. It shows the islands of New Zealand that have this species as well as Victoria and South Australia. I use full regions rather than coastlines for two reasons: the first is that this crab lives in a small sliver of the coast maybe a few hundred meters thick, and thus any attempt to portray it would be inaccurate; secondly and more importantly, the data in Australia is so unbelievably sparse that any attempt to draw it would functionally be WP:OR. The brown is sampled from the carapace and is easily discernible from the background.
• The frontal image of O. catharus rounds out the view of O. catharus (more on that later). It additionally shows O. catharus living in a typical seafloor habitat. The mouth, eyestalks, and setae under the carapace are visible in a way not seen in the first two, and it's posed in a way the crab would naturally be when not dead. It's under the 'Description' section since it represents the only major external part of the crab not yet shown by the infobox images.
• I describe the swimming image when talking to RoySmith above. O. catharus is often called the "swimming crab" or "common swimming crab", and they're known primarily for using their paddles to swim (hence "paddle crab"). O. catharus moves its paddles quite rapidly, and thus anything better than this (this is the only image I could find of it swimming) is likely to be in the form of a video of a captive specimen. I see this image as important due to the defining prominence of this one action it performs (it defines two of its three nicknames). It's under the 'Taxonomy' section as compromise, wherein 16:9 displays or higher would have the image straddling two sections if it were in 'Description' or would make the bottom of the article extremely crowded otherwise.
• The preserved plate of O. catharus is from the `Commons:Batch uploading/AucklandMuseumCCBY` sweep of the Auckland Museum, where the API returned that it was licensed under CC BY. The chalae are crucial to identifying O. catharus from other species of Ovalipes, and this image from the Auckland Museum shows the degree of granularity on the chelae very nicely (as well as the width, the third major aspect in differentiating them). For this reason and because it's a museum plate, it's placed in the 'Taxonomy' section. Additionally, while unmentioned in the article, it shows that O. catharus when preserved has substantially different coloration from live or recently deceased, as brought up in Stephenson & Rees 1968. I may add this to the caption and/or the article.
• The images in the cladogram are, respectively: 1) O. australiensis CC BY-SA 4.0 International linked to Museums Victoria; 2) O. punctatus from 2007 which I could find no reason to believe isn't the work of Anonymous Powered (the prior two images of the same specimen which are substantially worse in quality and the backstory of buying this commonly sold crab help confirm this to me); 3) O. trimaculatus linked to iNaturalist under CC BY 4.0; 4) the same image of O. catharus from the infobox; 5) O. ocellatus linked to the Yale Peabody Museum under CC0; O. stephensoni linked to iNaturalist under CC BY 4.0; O. floridanus linked to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Flickr under CC BY 2.0; O. iridescens linked to the Centro Oceanográfico de Cádiz under CC BY 4.0 (logo from top left cropped); and O. molleri linked to the Australian Museum under CC BY 3.0 Unported. The only identification not sourced to an expert is that of O. punctatus, and it's easy from here to reference both Stephenson & Rees 1968 p. 217 and images identified by experts to conclude this is O. punctatus.
• The image of Paphies australis is linked to iNaturalist under a CC BY license, and it's one of three species whose genus is a prominent representative of O. catharus' bivalve prey. I would like this to be an image of O. catharus eating one, but no such image exists. The caption (with attribution) describes bivalves being a substantial portion of the crab's diet, and it's in the 'Diet and foraging behaviour' section.
• The video of O. catharus burrowing is linked to iNaturalist under a CC BY license. It shows a prominent, well-studied behavior of the crab which it frequently employs to hide from predators, and thus it's in 'Predators and other interactions'. The caption reflects this fact.
• The image of Little Akaloa is uploaded under CC BY-SA 4.0 by New Zealand resident and prominent Commons user Michal Klajban ('Podzemnik'). This location is discussed prominently in Osborne 1987 as a breeding grounds for the crabs (cited in caption), arguably a seminal work in the history of O. catharus' life cycle. While it would be interesting to have crabs on the beach, I don't believe this is realistic, as they typically come out onto the shore at night.
• Images I would like to have include O. catharus cannibalizing a conspecific or O. catharus being eaten by one of its various predators (we have an image from iNaturalist of O. catharus being eaten by a gull, but birds don't seem to be one of the major predator groups and thus seems like a poor representation). I would additionally like an image of O. catharus being fished or, more preferably, an image of O. catharus featured in Māori artwork. It would be great to have a view of other developmental stages, namely the egg, zoea, and megalopa. Finally, it would be interesting to have a dissected view of the crab for the 'Internal anatomy' section, although this probably isn't reasonable. For all of these, I've searched extensively and found nothing – even non-free media. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 19:59, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Gog the Mild: Checking back in only because I don't want to wait until the nom is already on thin ice: I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do with AryKun currently on a short but undefined wikibreak; Generalissima's, Jens', Roy's, and Dudley's reviews complete (all support); and Jo-Jo Eumerus' source and image review ostensibly complete (please correct me if I'm wrong, Jo-Jo). I could poll Traumnovelle, Alexeyevitch, and/or Prosperosity (all three of whom have a background in writing articles on species) to see if they'd like to add their own reviews (potentially with a focus on factuality more than presentation to round out the nom), but I don't know if this is proper behavior for a nominator. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 19:19, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

'tis a lot of images, albeit well-placed. File:Ovalipes catharus dorsal plate.jpg and File:Ovalipes catharus dorsal plate.jpg at their iNaturalist source is tagged as all rights reserved, File:Ovalipes catharus frontal view underwater.jpg as noncommerical. Somewhat pedantic since it's several steps removed from this article, but File:Age of consent - Global.svg (which is what the map is derived from, apparently) might need some discussion on how the geographical outline was obtained. Where is the copyright licence of File:Ovalipes catharus White, 1843 (AM MA78855).jpg and File:Ovalipes ocellatus (YPM IZ 030799).jpeg? ALT text is OK, I guess. Source review wise, there is a diversity of sources, which I guess explains why their formatting is so inconsistent. Some sources are theses; are they widely cited or were they reviewed by experts? Why does Clayton 1990 require a quote? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:13, 19 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the Inaturalist one: The observation is "all rights reserved", but that does not apply to the image, which is cc-by-sa, as you can see here. Ditto the other one here. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 12:16, 19 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: As Jens points out, iNaturalist has different licenses for the observations and the images (which confused me too at first, but you can see this by clicking the '🛈' information bubble on the image). For O. ocellatus, if you go to the Peabody Museum link and click 'Detail View' at the bottom, there's a 'rights' parameter which states 'http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/'. All media accessible via the Auckland Museum API is linked open data which "does not impede its reuse for free"; thus, I have no reason to doubt that this was correctly collected under 'Commons:Batch uploading/AucklandMuseumCCBY' (this information would be found via a database query). As long as there's an easy-to-follow chain back to 'BlankMap-World-Compact.svg' showing that everything along the way is CC0, I'm okay with only listing the immediate derivations. Citation formatting is consistent, but some just have more information available than others (e.g. some lack identifiers like bibcodes and JSTORs; some have journals which lack a Wikipedia article and thus need an ISSN; some only have a year rather than a month for their publication date; some are theses and thus use 'Cite thesis' instead of 'Cite journal'; and some are books). I quote Clayton 1990 because this is a single footnote in our article, and this is just a tangential aside in Clayton 1990, yet no freely accessible version of this article exists, and it costs $40 to access. Unlike something like, say, Iftikar 2010 (also has no free access) where the information is too broad to quote, this is the literal only snippet of information that I'm citing in Clayton 1990, thus making this feasible to understand for readers without institutional access. I see this as strictly beneficial to the reader while staying in-bounds for fair use. The five theses are as follows in chronological order:

• R. Davidson 1987 is a master's thesis written a year after he published an article on a very similar subject and had become an expert on O. catharus' feeding behavior. We cite this one time (as we do the other two master's theses). This thesis is cited by Fisheries New Zealand as well as three peer-reviewed journal articles (Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology (1990), Hydrobiologia (2002), and Marine Ecology Progress Series (2024)). The 1990 article is co-authored by C.L. McLay, who at the time was a leading expert on Ovalipes. We cite it alongside two others (including Fisheries NZ) to substantiate the importance of algae as a food source for the crab. Although Fisheries NZ mentions this off-hand, R. Davidson 1987 goes into much greater depth about how and why O. catharus feeds on algae, and I see our citations not just as a tool for verification but as a gateway to better, more comprehensive sources on the things we say about a subject.
• Osborne 1987 is a PhD thesis and a seminal work in the field, widely cited (to a point where anything cited to Osborne which we try to quote from other sources will probably themselves be citing Osborne, making it just a roundabout way to cite Osborne). This one would be entirely non-negotiable in an article on O. catharus; essentially every article mentioning O. catharus' life cycle since its publication and then some has cited it. I can say for certain that Google Scholar is undercounting it, because I've seen it in other journal articles; I won't belabor it by digging them up, though, since this one is just obvious even accounting for how often we cite it.
• Richards 1992 is a master's thesis which is discussed in the Good Article nomination, where Esculenta and I both reach the conclusion that its inclusion is merited taking into account that it's cited in G. Davidson & Taylor 1995, that a personal communication with Richards is later cited in the same paper regarding thickness of the branchiostegites, and that H.H. Taylor provided substantial technical assistance during the work (see the one on G. Davidson 1994 for more information on both of these people). It's also cited in the 1999 version of the 2023 Fisheries paper we cite. We cite it one time, and it's just for a basic statement about O. catharus' ability to osmoregulate ("weak osmoregulator or an osmoconformer"). The entire focus of the thesis is on O. catharus' ability to do this, and thus "weak osmoregulator or osmoconformer" wouldn't just be some mistake that slipped in absent peer review; the entire thesis would have to be completely, utterly incorrect in a way that it wouldn't reasonably make it past a thesis defense, let alone get cited a year later by two other subject matter experts.
• G. Davidson 1994 is a PhD thesis, and by this point, he's long-since been an expert in the subject of breathing in crabs. For example, he co-authored a chapter in a monograph with three other experts such as H.H. Taylor in 1992 on the dorsoventral muscles of crabs (they control gill blood flow) and later in 1995 published an article on ventilatory and vascular routes in O. catharus alongside H.H. Taylor. Taylor also supervised this thesis, and it's cited in G. Davidson & Taylor the next year (although I don't consider it that notable since it's the same author and supervisor) as well as the Fisheries 1999 report. This one is simply used as a statement for how much the crabs weigh; thus, I might consider it "overqualified".
• Weaver 2017 is a master's thesis on the possible reasons for the decline in the O. catharus fishery. This thesis is cited by a peer-reviewed journal article, namely one in New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research (2023), as well as a 2024 preprint in Biological Invasions. We cite it once alongside Fisheries 2023, and this is just to substantiate that the cause for the decline isn't well-understood (once again, a similar case to R. Davidson 1987 where Fisheries 2023 says it off-hand, but the thesis goes into much greater depth, providing the reader with a gateway rather than just a verification).

Sorry for this being so long-winded. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 15:35, 19 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: What general tips would you give for improving the alt text? If it's just "good enough", I want to do better. Incidentally, given this is my second FAC and the second time the alt text has come up, where can I suggest and discuss explicitly mentioning this in criterion 3? Because I agree that this accessibility feature is crucial to FA status. We mention this at WP:FL? but not at WP:FA? TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 22:07, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the may be overly long, but I tend towards the detailed ALT text. Fair on the theses. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:13, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• "allow it to swim rapidly to capture prey and to burrow in the sand". "... to ... to ... to ..." Any chance of tweaking that phrase?
  • Oh, that's the new experimental tense I read about: the trifinitive. RoySmith (talk) 21:43, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • That would be the one, but I understood that it only applied to organisms which were trilaterally symmetrical. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:04, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• "the paddle crab could become outcompeted by Charybdis japonica". Is there any reason we can't just say 'the paddle crab could be outcompeted by Charybdis japonica'?

Gog the Mild (talk) 19:56, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• @Gog the Mild: I'm going to give you some pushback here and clarify that there are in fact four "to"s in that sentence. ;) Yes, fixed. Haha
• "could become outcompeted" to me implies more in a hypothetical future than "could be outcompeted by", which could imply (and to me reading does imply) a present tense. There's presently no direct evidence that C. japonica is actively outcompeting O. catharus in the wild (although it very obviously does so in the lab). However, a combination of you and AryKun bringing up this same point tells me it reads unnaturally, so I've rewritten the sentence to avoid this dilemma altogether. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 03:00, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Closing note: This candidate has been promoted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Gog the Mild (talk) 11:17, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.