During the INDEMARES/CHICA 0610, 0211 and 0412 expeditions, carried out in the northern Spanish sector of the Gulf of Cádiz (Spain), samples were collected with a box-corer in 11 mud volcanoes and their adjacent bottoms. Chemoautotrophic communities were found in nine mud volcanoes. Among Decapoda, a rare eucalliacid, belonging to the genus Calliax and related to the Mediterranean infralittoral species C. lobata (de Gaillande and Lagardère 1966), was present in three of them. Data on its morphology, biogeographic distribution, vertical distribution within the burrows, sediment composition, pH and redox potential values (each in 5 cm intervals) are given; information on the chemoautotrophic communities associated with this species are also provided.

Let $R$ be a ring and $b,c\in R$ . In this paper, we give some characterizations of the $(b,c)$ -inverse in terms of the direct sum decomposition, the annihilator, and the invertible elements. Moreover, elements with equal $(b,c)$ -idempotents related to their $(b,c)$ -inverses are characterized, and the reverse order rule for the $(b,c)$ -inverse is considered.

The formation of massive stars remains one of the most intriguing questions in astrophysics today. The main limitations result from the difficulty to obtain direct observational constraints on the formation process itself. In this context, the Carina High-contrast Imaging Project of massive Stars (CHIPS) aims to observe all 80+ O stars in the Carina nebula using the new VLT 2nd-generation extreme-AO instrument SPHERE. This instrument offers unprecedented imaging contrast allowing us to detect the faintest companions around massive stars. These novel observational constraints will help to discriminate between the different formation scenarios by comparing their predictions for companion statistics and properties.

The composition and structure of sublittoral faunal assemblages inhabiting soft bottoms (15–72 m depth) within the Marine Protected Area ‘Acantilados y Fondos Marinos de Calahonda-Castell de Ferro’ in southern Spain (North Alboran Sea, Mediterranean) have been studied in relation to sediment and water column variables. Three assemblages were identified and corresponded to mixed bottom, unstable bottom and coastal detritic bottom assemblages, based on Pérès & Picard's (1964) benthic classification. A total of 14,318 individuals were collected and 218 species identified, molluscs being the best represented group (141 species). Species richness displayed significant differences with depth and transect, with the highest values observed in the medium to very fine sand and muddy bottoms with bioclasts located at the shallowest sampling stations. The presence of some rare and poorly known invertebrates that are scarce in other areas of the Mediterranean Sea is remarkable, such as the crustacean decapods Bythocaris cosmetops and Pagurus mbizi, Atlantic species with no records in the Mediterranean Sea, and the bathyal molluscs Poromya granulata and Alvania testae, collected at shallow depths. The spatial distribution of faunal assemblages was mainly related to depth and percentage of gravel and clay according to the canonical correspondence analysis. The geographic location of the area, the heterogeneity of soft bottoms and the presence of upwellings in the area may favour the high biodiversity found in the studied soft bottoms. This study increases the scarce knowledge of the circalittoral fauna of sedimentary habitats of the Alboran Sea, providing a baseline for the management of this interesting SCI and for the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive.

Living specimens of the amphi-Atlantic asteroid Hacelia superba have been collected in different areas of Gazul mud volcano in the Gulf of Cadiz, south-western Iberian Peninsula, at depths of 380–487 m. This starfish displayed low abundances (~1 ind. 2000 m−2) in beam trawl catches on the mud vulcano and adjacent soft bottoms. The absence of previous records in this area could be due to a low sampling effort on bathyal hard bottoms of the Gulf of Cadiz, especially those of dormant mud volcanoes, as well as a possible misidentification as Hacelia attenuata that also occurs in the area but is restricted to infralittoral and circalitoral bottoms.

The taxonomy of pedunculate cirripedes belonging to the genus Pollicipes has essentially remained unchanged since Charles Darwin described them in his exhaustive work on the Cirripedia. This genus includes three species of stalked barnacles: Pollicipes pollicipes in the north-eastern Atlantic, P. polymerus in the north-eastern Pacific and P. elegans in the central-eastern Pacific. However, a population genetics analysis of P. pollicipes suggested the presence of a putative cryptic species collected from the Cape Verde Islands in the central-eastern Atlantic. This study examines the morphology of these genetically divergent specimens and compares them with that of representative Atlantic samples of the biogeographically closely related P. pollicipes and with the poorly described P. elegans. Molecular data, including mitochondrial COX1 and nuclear ribosomal interspaces sequences, were obtained for all species of the genus Pollicipes. Morphological distinctiveness, diagnostic characters, congruent divergence level and monophyletic clustering, at both nuclear and mitochondrial loci support the taxonomic status of this new species, Pollicipes darwini.

In this paper, the rings which have a torsion theory τ with associated torsion radical τ such that R/t(R) has a minimal τ-torsionfree cogenerator are studied. When τ is the trivial torsion theory these are precisely the left QF-3 rings. For τ = τL, the Lambek torsion theory, this class of rings is wider but, with an additional hypothesis on τL it is shown that if R has this property with respect to the Lambek torsion theory on both sides, then R is a (left and right) QF-3 ring. The results obtained are applied to get new characterizations of QF-3 rings with the ascending chain condition on left annihilators.

A ring R is called left QF-3 if it has a minimal faithful left R-module. The endomorphism ring of such a module has been recently studied in [7], where conditions are given for it to be a left PF ring or a QF ring. The object of the present paper is to study, more generally, when the endomorphism ring of a Σ-quasi-projective module over any ring R is left QF-3. Necessary and sufficient conditions for this to happen are given in Theorem 2. An useful concept in this investigation is that of a QF-3 module which has been introduced in [11]. If M is a finitely generated quasi-projective module and σ[M] denotes the category of all modules isomorphic to submodules of modules generated by M, then we show that End(RM) is a left QF-3 ring if and only if the quotient module of M modulo its torsion submodule (in the torsion theory of σ[M] canonically defined by M) is a QF-3 module (Corollary 4). Finally, we apply these results to the study of the endomorphism ring of a minimal faithful R-module over a left QF-3 ring, extending some of the results of [7].