Can you spot the duplicates? Critics say these photos of lionfish point to fraud.

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Part of the collage posted on the Biology Letters website that a correction note says provides evidence of the number of lionfish used in experiments in an Australian lab.
▼ How many fish really appear in the photo collage above? The answer bears on whether a  study about lionfish social  behavior, published inBiology Lettersin 2014, was fabricated—and whether Oona Lönnstedt, a marine biologist formerly at Uppsala University (UU) in Sweden who made up data in a 2016Sciencepaper, committed an earlier fraud. The case also raises fresh questions about whether senior scientists working with Lönnstedt, who was then a Ph.D. student, properly oversaw and took responsibility for her work.
Last year, Lönnstedt and her co-authors posted the collage on theBiology Letterswebsite in what appeared to be an attempt to end questions about whether the scientists really caught enough fish to carry out their behavioral experiments. But critics say the colorful ensemble appears to include many photos of the same fish, and in some cases doctored duplicates of the same photo—which would undermine the authors’ defense.
The lionfish study was done in 2012, when Lönnstedt was a student at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Australia. But the suspicions about it resemble those that discredited the 2016 Science studyof the effects of microplastics on fish larvae. There, too, researchers  questioned whether Lönnstedt  had collected the claimed  number of fishand wondered how she could have recorded reams of behavioral data without videotaping the experiments. In 2017, both UU and a national Swedish ethics panel confirmed the doubts  about the Science paper, co-authored with UU biologist Peter Eklöv. It was retracted and Lönnstedt, who maintained her innocence, lost her job.
Lönnstedt, who has left research, did not respond to requests for comment sent by email and to her residence. Her co-authors on the Biology Letters paper, Maud Ferrari and Douglas Chivers, both of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, say they don’t know whether Lönnstedt used as many lionfish as the paper claims. But they dispute that the collage, which they say Lönnstedt produced, was meant to dispel doubts about the number. (Chivers was also an external co-supervisor of Lönnstedt’s Ph.D. research.)
The paper described a series of  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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