Exploring below the surface: Introducing underwater notes

Aquaculture, Fish and Fisheries recently celebrated its third anniversary and as part of our ongoing development, we aim to continue to be author-friendly, inclusive and collaborative within the research community and beyond. In our recent editorial to mark the occasion, we set out several ongoing activities at the journal which we hope will continue to improve the author experience (Bailey et al., 2024). As part of this process, we re-evaluated our initial article types, and taking this into account, we will soon be launching a new article type unique to Aquaculture, Fish and Fisheries: Underwater Notes.

Underwater Notes are distinct from our current roster of article types and will provide a platform for atypical/uncharted findings, or questions that may be seen in a new population, or associated with a new species in an unexpected way either relating to diverse themes in aquaculture and fisheries science or fish biology encompassing both marine and freshwater organisms. While we aim to keep an open-minded approach with Underwater Notes, we are not simply looking for validation studies or corroborative reports. They are to be in a shorter format than traditional research articles and include thought-provoking, significant, preliminary studies, experimental procedures, new technologies/systems, or applied activities within laboratories or in the field and opportunistic observations that may not adhere to our more traditional articles, that is hypothesis-driven research.

The idea for this article type stems from collaborative conversations with scientists and editors from multiple disciplines, in which a need was identified for a bridge between full research articles and other streamlined approaches such as short communications, but at the same time convey wider versatility. For instance, ecologists and evolutionary biologists were increasingly looking to reinvigorate the traditional, but neglected over time, discipline of natural history research. In addressing this, Ecology and Evolution developed Nature Notes (Jenkins et al., 2022; Moore et al., 2020), which have seen many new descriptions of species, previously undocumented behaviours and species occurrence reports in areas where they were previously unrecorded. Similar approaches have been taken by journals such as Biotropica (Powers et al. 2021). While this approach draws from other disciplines, we seek to address a need specific to this journal's community, and we feel that Aquaculture, Fish and Fisheries must look to provide its authors with an outlet for their work in the format they wish to present it in. This factors in the broad scope of the journal and applies to studies of all farmed and wild aquatic organisms, encompassing both conservation, production and cultural insights.

We seek, as always, to be author-friendly, and as such we are not setting any limits on words or figures. However, we encourage authors to aim for brief and concise observations. Underwater Notes will be subject to the same standards of rigorous editorial assessment, peer review and data availability statements as all our other article types. Ultimately, we aspire to continue our sound science approach and author-friendly philosophy and give the community a continued opportunity to report on significant environmental, sustainable and socioeconomic themes that impact both wild and farmed aquatic organisms, as stated in our scope. As always, we look forward to working with authors to publish their work.

Christyn Bailey: Conceptualization; visualization; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing. Gareth B. Jenkins: Conceptualization; visualization; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing. Joy A. Becker: Conceptualization; validation; visualization; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing. Ricardo Calado: Conceptualization; visualization; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing.