Nope, not exactly. The publication of this article will be seen as empirical evidence that sex change occurred in these particular subjects under these particular conditions. You can't necessarily extrapolate the results to any other species or conditions. But you can continue to investigate the subject and see if this is common or not."but yall are all acting like it is common knowledge that African Cichlids can change sex"
They reported the species name accurately. In binomial nomenclature, "cf." is used when identification has not been absolutely confirmed. The reason they used it is because the taxonomy of Metriaclima and many other Malawi cichlids has not been entirely worked out, and speciation continues. See:"Read by a couple of academic folk before publication (freinds maybe) who have never vissited or checked the experiments (and for sure did not check the species name as being valid) would be my guess."
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/9/5107.full.pdf+html
You do not get to choose who reviews your work prior to publication in an academic journal.
"Reviewers are typically anonymous and independent, to help foster unvarnished criticism, and to discourage cronyism in funding and publication decisions. Since reviewers are normally selected from experts in the fields discussed in the article, the process of peer review is considered critical to establishing a reliable body of research and knowledge. Scholars reading the published articles can only be expert in a limited area; they rely, to some degree, on the peer-review process to provide reliable and credible research that they can build upon for subsequent or related research. As a result, significant scandal ensues when an author is found to have falsified the research included in an article, as many other scholars, and the field of study itself, may have relied upon the original research."
In other words, to report something inaccurately, or to bias the experiment or results, would not benefit the authors in any way. Quite the contrary--it would ruin their reputations.
"Why was this not picked up if it had a good peer review before apearing?"
Probably because hobbyists are not as likely to be members of associations such as the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists? http://www.asihcopeiaonline.org/ There are thousands of academic journals published every month. http://journalseek.net/bio.htm If you want to keep up on cichlid research, you could bookmark all those where such research is published and monitor the tables of contents each month. I monitor 50 journals related to salmon biology, river ecology, fluvial geomorphology, etc. as part of my job, but I pay for a service to have them emailed to me.
If you are truly interested in academic research on cichlids, you can do searches using GoogleScholar and find everything published on the subject that is in electronic form. The problem is that you need paid access to view the full text of many papers and subscriptions to scientific journals can cost hundreds of dollars each; therefore, it is best to have access to a university library to view the actual papers.
For example, a search of "cichlids sex change" brings up quite a lot of papers on the subject, that similar results were found decades ago, and that maybe this is nothing to be surprised at:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q1g1q18w6564m13t/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q63777pq170k3518/fulltext.pdf?page=1
http://filer.case.edu/rgo/OldfieldFAF2005.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2830890
Finally, although I knew that some fish could change sex, I did not know that cichlids did, and I did not know that it could result from behavioral interactions. But now that I see the research that has been done, it's enough to convince me that it can happen under certain circumstances.
http://www.pnas.org/content/90/22/10673.full.pdf+html"Sexual differentiation in teleost [bony] fishes is characteristically labile. The most dramatic form of sexual lability is postmaturational sex change, which is common among teleosts although rare or absent in other vertebrate taxa. In many cases this process is regulated by social cues, particularly dominance interactions."
has such a glaring error.
