Sir

The thought-provoking Concepts essay “A watery arms race” by Victor Smetacek (Nature 411, 745; 2001) concerns defence systems in the phytoplankton, yet the illustration shows a testate amoeba — neither planktonic nor photosynthetic!

I like to think that most students of freshwater biology 20 years, even 10 years, ago would have recognized the incongruity. But what leaves me frightened for the future of whole-organism biology is that Nature, the prestige biology journal, should be guilty of such a howler.

Doubtless the picture was sought in a hurry and in the interests of immediacy. This is all very well for those who set store by citation indices, but the consequence is that the article may be mentioned as much for the wrong reasons (as an example of the demise of whole-organism biology) as for the right ones. It is scarcely fair to the author, to his interesting ideas or to our discipline.