Extract

Peer review is usually a labor of love. Even on a good day, reconsider after major revision is the most common recommendation, and an unblinking accept a rarity. Occasionally a reviewer is privileged to read an absolute jewel of a paper and writes an opening sentence that begins “The manuscript by Norifumi Konno et al. is a pleasure to read, and the following comments are counsels of perfection rather than criticisms.”

The paper documents the endocrinology of water homeostasis in the African lungfish. Lungfish are extraordinary creatures, with lungs and gills, living records of the evolutionary transition from aquatic to terrestrial life. Today they are most commonly found in high-end pet shops, but their free-living condition in the old Gondwanaland radiation is in the seasonal streams and swamps in Africa, South America, and Australia. Konno et al. (1) have characterized the vasotocin (VT)/aquaporin (AQP) axis in lungfish, parallel to the mammalian vasopressin/AQP AQP2 axis, and establish how lungfish cope when the seasonal streams and marshes dry up each year.

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