Diplosoma gumavirens specimens were collected from the Penghu Islands, Taiwan. This is the first record of photosymbiotic ascidians in the Taiwan Strait, where the minimum water temperature in the winter is <16°C because of intrusion of the China Coastal Current.

This study focuses on the dynamics of copepod abundances and species composition in the upper water column of a marine outfall area Tso-Ying (T-Y) in the boundary waters of the north-eastern South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait as an example. Zooplankton samples were collected in March, June and September 2002. Mean copepod abundance at all stations ranged from a minimum of 9.4 (individuals m−3) in March to a maximum of 1685 (individuals m−3) in June. A total of 66 copepod species belonging to 31 genera and 19 families were identified during three cruises. Copepod assemblages were dominated by Temora turbinata which occurred in >97% samples with a relative abundance of 75.46% combining all three sampling cruises. The ordination diagram derived from non-metric multidimensional scaling separated samples on the basis of season and revealed that different sampling stations clustered differently during each cruise. The second and third most dominant species were Acrocalanus gracilis and Acrocalanus gibber, representing 1.73% and 1.65% of the total copepod abundance respectively. The outfall area studied here correlates with lower copepod densities represented by a few species that show a higher relative abundance in comparison with non-affected areas. We provide here the first example where plankton assemblages indicate useful information about environmental changes in the course of sewage disposal at a stable outlet site.

Most of the contemporary policy debate regarding economic interdependence and peace has focused on devising responses either in favor of or in opposition to the prevailing notion that trade is positively and unconditionally correlated with peace. The China and Taiwan case—noteworthy for the simultaneous presence of an ever-increasing economic interdependence and an adversarial political relationship—provides an interesting counterexample to the leading positions in the literature. What is missing in the literature is a model that studies states' decisions to trade and initiate conflict as a function not only of their own utility but also of their perceptions about how their opponent will respond. States' decisions to trade depend on the likelihood that their prospective trade partner will initiate a conflict, and decisions to initiate a conflict depend on perceptions of the likelihood that the target will concede. In this article, the authors develop a model that expands the domain of the trade-peace analysis by endogenizing and analyzing states' decisions to trade and initiate conflicts.