American biologist accuses ZSI of raising texts

New Delhi: The Zoological Survey of India investigates allegations of an American marine biologist that ZSI scientists allegedly plagiarized a text of 39, a book on corals and published false claims about coral species around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Corals specialist Douglas Fenner claimed that a 152-page monograph published by ZSI scientists in 2010 contained textual text from a book titled Corals of the World from John Veron, an Australian coral authority, published about ten years ago.

In an email circulating among a group of marine biologists around the world, Fenner also expressed concern about the discovery of coral species. Scientists believe that Fenner's observations in email put a question mark on the ethics, quality and supervision of science at ZSI, an agency based in Calcutta "It is surprising that They (ZSI scientists) report Caribbean species because these species are known only from the Caribbean, they have never been found outside the Caribbean. "If the authors knew how surprising this discovery was and important, they would have made a big part of it, worth a big paper in a big newspaper, "he added." A person who knows the coral species well enough to identify all these species knows that these species are not the Indian Ocean and would not want to report them from the Indian Ocean without any significant documents proving their presence. "

Fenner also has examples cited to show that the ZSI monograph of 2010, intitu "New records of scleractinian corals in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands", contains text reproduced verbatim from Veron's book in 2010 and a web document on coral reefs

. The price of Rs 800 on the monograph with the alleged plagiarized text, has now set up an investigation committee to review the allegations made by Fenner, ZSI director Kailash Chandra said.

"We have for the moment removed the monograph of the ZSI website, while we are trying to verify the facts," Chandra says The Telegraph .

However, the monograph was still available Tuesday on the website – www.faunaofindia.nic.in – The ZSI logo

Fenner said that he had decided to circulate email to marine biologists only after contacting ZSI scientists and felt that "corrective measures" would not be available.

admit that they were wrong, "Fenner said over the phone by telephone in American Samoa in the South Pacific Ocean where he has been studying corals for over 14 years.

" I know that There is a lot of good science in India and when scientists say that the monograph, published by the ZSI as a paid publication, highlights poor supervision by seasoned scientists

. among the co-authors of the monograph, there was no intentional wrongdoing. "The text had taxonomic descriptions and we did not want to distort descriptions already made by an authority – that was a mistake, but we never thought it was plagiarism . "

ZSI scientists also told the newspaper with Fenner to re-examine their claims on Caribbean coral species in Andaman and make corrections in their papers if necessary.

ZSI has already been implicated in allegations of plagiarism. In 2014, Peter Smetacek of the Bhimtal Butterfly Research Center, Uttarakhand, accused ZSI scientists of stealing the common names of the hawkmoths he and his colleagues from London and Hong Kong had proposed. The same year, said Smetacek, the ZSI had to withdraw another monograph on Arunachal Pradesh butterflies after discovering images of butterflies from the Philippines.