In this reply, we address the criticism directed recently to our work by Galil et al. (2016) dismissing the hypothesis that the Suez Canal can act as a revolving door allowing marine species to move both ways between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. We reiterate that the presence in the Red Sea of the Indo-West Pacific sea slug Chelidonura fulvipunctata Baba, 1938 is most parsimoniously explained by an invasion from the Mediterranean and highlight several recent studies combing morphology and molecular phylogenetics where established views about the presence of alien Indo-Pacific / Red Sea species in the Mediterranean were proven wrong. Caution is suggested when assuming the conspecificity of species between these realms based solely on external features.

Turtles are characterized by their possession of a shell with dorsal and ventral moieties: the carapace and the plastron, respectively. In this review, we try to provide answers to the question of the evolutionary origin of the carapace, by revising morphological, developmental, and paleontological comparative analyses. The turtle carapace is formed through modification of the thoracic ribs and vertebrae, which undergo extensive ossification to form a solid bony structure. Except for peripheral dermal elements, there are no signs of exoskeletal components ontogenetically added to the costal and neural bones, and thus the carapace is predominantly of endoskeletal nature. Due to the axial arrest of turtle rib growth, the axial part of the embryo expands laterally and the shoulder girdle becomes encapsulated in the rib cage, together with the inward folding of the lateral body wall in the late phase of embryogenesis. Along the line of this folding develops a ridge called the carapacial ridge (CR), a turtle-specific embryonic structure. The CR functions in the marginal growth of the carapacial primordium, in which Wnt signaling pathway might play a crucial role. Both paleontological and genomic evidence suggest that the axial arrest is the first step toward acquisition of the turtle body plan, which is estimated to have taken place after the divergence of a clade including turtles from archosaurs. The developmental relationship between the CR and the axial arrest remains a central issue to be solved in future.

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：We developed and executed a management plan for the extermination of the invasive turtle Trachemys scripta elegans in a closed water body as a case study in the moats of Sasayama Castle, Tanbasasayama City, Hyogo Prefecture. We captured turtles using 150 traps baited with fish during 11 trapping intervals between July 2015 and September 2015, for a total of 1650 trap nights. We used the number of individuals caught per trap (Catch per Unit Effort, CPUE) as a measure of removal effectiveness and found that the CPUE of the baited traps decreased from 1.10 to 0.10 by the end of trapping in 2015. Since 2016, we used two types of traps, baited traps and basking traps, the latter designed to take advantage of basking behavior. The median CPUE of basking traps was 1.15, whereas the median CPUE of baited traps was 0.15, indicating that the basking traps were more effective even when baited traps were present. We captured significantly more females than males with baited traps (Chi-squared test, p＜0.05) , while basking traps used in conjunction with baited traps captured more juveniles (plastron length less than 50 mm) than the total number of individuals captured by basking traps. These findings suggest that for the effective removal of T. s. elegans, it is important to use a combination of different trapping methods.