Figure 1. Approximate distribution of harbor porpoise in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (shaded area). Stock boundaries separating the stocks are shown. STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE In the eastern North Pacific Ocean, the harbor porpoise ranges from Point Barrow, along the Alaskan coast, and down the west coast of North America to Point Conception, California (Gaskin 1984). Harbor porpoise...

Not long ago, the skeleton was viewed as a mere supporting structure appealing only to a small group of specialists. Research in the past two decades, however , has revealed marvelous intricacies concerning the formation and remod-eling of the skeleton, its intimate connections with other organs in the body, and elegant genetic circuitries that regulate skeletal cell differentiation. These new ...

These days, one hears a lot about epigenetics and epige-netic regulation. Attesting to the current popularity of the subject, a PubMed search using " epigenetics " as the key word returns 17,233 entries (from 1964 to 2006), of which 86% date from the year 2000. What exactly is epigenetics and why has there been this recent surge of interest in this subject? For those researchers working on epig...