An international team led by Xaver Neitemeier-Duventester and Harry Wilhelm Palm of the University of Rostock, together with colleagues from Udayana University in Bali, examined twenty-three rays purchased at the Pasar Ikan Tradisional Kedonganan fish market on Bali’s southern coast between November 2018 and September 2021. Twelve of the specimens belonged to Rhinobatos jimbaranensis, a species recorded so far only from the eastern Indian Ocean off southern Bali and listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List. The remaining eleven were R. penggali, an endemic relative known from the southern coasts of Java, Bali, and Lombok. Both rays live on inner island shelves at depths of one to sixty meters and were described to science only in 2006.

The researchers focused on the order Trypanorhyncha, one of the most species-rich groups of marine cestodes and a group whose members are distributed worldwide. These tapeworms are prized by parasitologists as biological indicators because their life cycles weave through the marine food web: larvae develop in invertebrates or fish, and adult worms settle in the intestines of sharks and rays. By cataloguing which tapeworm species infect a host, scientists can infer details about its diet, migration, and zoogeographic distribution without directly observing the animal at sea.

Using standardized dissection and a gut-wash technique to flush every worm from the stomach and spiral valve, the team recovered twelve trypanorhynch species in total, ten from R. jimbaranensis and eight from R. penggali. Six species infected both ray species: Dollfusiella spinosa, Parachristianella indonesiensis, Parachristianella monomegacantha, Prochristianella clarkeae, Pseudochristianella jimbaranensis sp. nov., and Trygonicola macropora. Four species appeared only in R. jimbaranensis, including Dollfusiella hemispinosa, an unidentified Dollfusiella, the new Prochristianella bicki sp. nov., and Proemotobothrium linstowi. Two others, Dollfusiella michiae and Kotorelliella jonesi, were found exclusively in R. penggali. In all, the survey established thirteen new host records and eight new locality records.

The two new species were diagnosed through a combination of classical morphology and cutting-edge imaging. Specimens were stained with Mayer-Schuberg’s acetic carmine, cleared in eugenol, and mounted permanently in Canada balsam for light microscopy. The team then turned to confocal laser scanning microscopy at the University of Rostock, using Leica DMI6000 CS and Stellaris 8 instruments to build three-dimensional reconstructions of the tentacles and their hook armatures, and to scanning electron microscopy at the Rostock University Medical Centre, where critical-point-dried specimens coated with gold revealed surface details at the micrometer scale.

Prochristianella bicki sp. nov., named in honor of Dr. Andreas Bick, former supervisor of the lead author, is a small worm measuring roughly 1.3 to 1.9 millimeters in length, found in the spiral valve of R. jimbaranensis. Its tentacle armature is heteroacanthous and heteromorphous, with solid hooks arranged in ascending half spirals of nine to ten hooks. A distinctive feature is that the first pair of hooks disappears beyond the eleventh or twelfth metabasal row, leaving only a rudimentary hook in row twelve. The species also carries a characteristic basal armature with four rows of enlarged billhook-shaped hooks on the basal swelling, and it lacks the prominent microtriches visible in several of its closest relatives. Its nearest morphological counterpart, Prochristianella mooreae, can be distinguished by its ten to twelve hollow hooks per half spiral, compared with the nine to ten solid hooks of the new species.

Pseudochristianella jimbaranensis sp. nov., named after both the type locality and the type host, proved to be the most common parasite in the study. Seventy-three specimens were recovered from R. jimbaranensis and thirty-five from R. penggali, giving it a prevalence of 83.33 percent in the former and 90.91 percent in the latter, the highest recorded in either host. The worm bears four to six proglottids, roughly forty-eight to fifty-two testes, and a metabasal armature of fifteen solid hooks per half spiral that reduces to thirteen toward the tip. Its defining trait lies in the basal armature: two rows of enlarged slender uncinate hooks, followed by four rows of small spiniform hooks, and approximately thirty-five to thirty-six billhooks arranged on the external surface of the basal swelling, a configuration that clearly separates it from the three previously described species of the genus.

Beyond the taxonomy, the parasite community told a story about feeding ecology. Most of the recorded trypanorhynchs belong to the superfamily Eutetrarhynchoidea, whose larvae typically develop in crustaceans, consistent with the known diet of both rays, which feed primarily on small bottom-dwelling invertebrates. But two of the recovered worms belong to families with fish intermediate hosts. Kotorelliella jonesi, a tentaculariid, was found only in R. penggali, a species already suspected of eating small bony fish based on stomach content analyses. More intriguingly, Proemotobothrium linstowi, an otobothriid whose plerocercus larvae have been documented in teleosts, appeared only in R. jimbaranensis. That finding suggests that this ray, like its congener, also occasionally includes fish in its diet, a behavioral nuance that stomach sampling alone had not confirmed for the species.

The study also revealed patterns of parasite community structure. Species of Parachristianella and Pseudochristianella showed high prevalences and abundances in both ray hosts and appear to function as core species in Balinese Rhinobatos, while the four Dollfusiella species, despite their taxonomic richness, occurred at low intensities and are best regarded as non-core members of the community. The dominance of eutetrarhynchoid tapeworms mirrors patterns seen in other Rhinobatos species worldwide, from R. productus in the Gulf of California to R. planiceps in Chile and R. rhinobatos in Tunisia, all of which host parasite assemblages dominated by the genera Dollfusiella, Prochristianella, Parachristianella, and Pseudochristianella.

The findings carry weight beyond parasitology. Indonesia hosts the richest elasmobranch fauna on Earth, with 221 species of sharks and rays, and once operated the world’s largest chondrichthyan fishery, landing more than 100,000 tonnes annually in the early 2000s. Today, roughly forty percent of shark species face extinction risk from habitat loss, prey depletion, and overfishing. Because parasites like trypanorhynchs encode ecological information about their hosts, documenting them can support conservation planning for species such as R. jimbaranensis, whose range is among the most restricted of any ray. The authors note that knowledge of the trypanorhynch fauna of Bali remains scarce, with only a handful of published surveys, and they call for further studies to explore the full species diversity of these tapeworms in Balinese waters. Holotype and paratype specimens of both new species were deposited in the Zoological Museum Bogor in Indonesia, with additional paratypes held at the Berlin Natural History Museum, ensuring the material remains accessible in the country of origin.

Subject of Research: Trypanorhynch tapeworm diversity and feeding ecology of endemic Rhinobatos rays from Bali, Indonesia

Article Title: Trypanorhyncha (Cestoda) from Endemic Rhinobatos Species (Elasmobranchii: Rhinobatidae) from Bali, Indonesia, with the Description of Two New Species

Article References: Neitemeier-Duventester, X., Suryaningtyas, E. W., Riegert, J. W., Damriyasa, I. M., Arthana, W., & Palm, H. W. (2026). Trypanorhyncha (Cestoda) from Endemic Rhinobatos Species (Elasmobranchii: Rhinobatidae) from Bali, Indonesia, with the Description of Two New Species. Acta Parasitologica, 71(5), Article 227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11686-026-01365-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11686-026-01365-3

Keywords: Trypanorhyncha, Cestoda, Rhinobatos jimbaranensis, Rhinobatos penggali, Bali, Indonesia, new species, parasitology, feeding ecology, elasmobranchs, confocal laser scanning microscopy, marine biodiversity

The paper, authored by Hatta Ridho, Husni Thamrin, Solahuddin Nasution, Arief Marizki Purba, and Mujahid Widian Saragih, introduces the Green Tourism Transition Management framework, or GTTM. Built from a narrative synthesis of fifty peer-reviewed studies published between 2024 and 2026, the framework consolidates three indicator domains that the existing literature has tended to examine in isolation: policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience. The authors’ central claim is deliberately provocative for the field: these three drivers are not substitutable levers from which managers can pick and choose, but jointly reinforcing conditions that produce transformative outcomes only when activated together. Policy coherence without digital enablement yields well-intentioned but operationally weak governance; digital innovation without community embeddedness risks deepening platform-economy inequality; and community resilience without supportive policy and digital infrastructure remains locally bounded and institutionally fragile.

The first domain, policy coherence, addresses the alignment of objectives, instruments, and institutional mandates across levels and sectors of government. Tourism intersects with climate policy, land use planning, transportation, culture, and social protection in ways that rarely fall under a single ministry. Evidence reviewed in the paper shows that destination governance performance correlates strongly with the degree to which national tourism policy is integrated with sub-national implementation capacity and cross-sectoral regulatory coherence. Where this integration is absent, destinations can hold impressive policy documents while environmental quality deteriorates and social inequalities widen on the ground. Research on Destination Management Organizations across the ten best-performing tourism countries in the Travel and Tourism Development Index identifies mandatory inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms as a key differentiator between high- and low-performing destinations, creating structural conditions for coherence that do not depend on the goodwill of individual officials.

The costs of policy incoherence are documented with particular clarity in Indonesia’s Super-Priority Destination of Labuan Bajo. There, national green tourism ambitions were undermined by absent coordination between the national tourism ministry, regional government, and community governance structures. Investment flowed into high-end resort infrastructure while community-based tourism enterprises remained undercapitalized, and environmental monitoring systems were installed without the community governance capacity needed to act on their data. The result was a destination that looked green on paper but continued to degrade environmentally while failing to deliver promised community benefits. By contrast, West Sumatra’s regional tourism master plan, known as RIPPDA, was designed from the outset as a coordination mechanism requiring alignment between provincial strategy, district spatial planning, and community development plans, and research documents measurably better coherence outcomes than in destinations relying on ad hoc inter-governmental coordination.

The second domain, digital innovation, has been reframed over the past decade from a marketing tool into a structural governance enabler. The authors draw a crucial technical distinction between digitization, meaning doing the same things with digital tools, and digital innovation, meaning doing fundamentally different things because of digital capabilities. Smart tourism infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and data analytics allow destination managers to monitor environmental conditions in real time, allocate visitor flows algorithmically, and integrate sustainability reporting across the value chain. But the evidence shows digital investment translates into sustainability benefits only when accompanied by smart governance capacity, the institutional capability to act on the data collected. Destinations that install sensor networks, visitor management apps, and AI analytics without building the governance structures to use them see limited benefits. Micro-level studies of digital leadership in hospitality firms reinforce this point: businesses with digitally competent managers are significantly more likely to convert digital investment into reduced energy consumption, lower waste, and improved environmental compliance, a mechanism the literature describes as green absorptive capability.

Bali provides the most extensively studied case of digital-sustainability integration in a developing country context. Research reviewed in the paper shows digital platforms facilitating circular economy flows in tourism supply chains, tracking material inputs, connecting suppliers of sustainably certified products, and giving tourists real-time information on the environmental footprint of their choices. Studies of Bali’s tour and travel small and medium enterprises report that green dynamic capabilities and green service innovation, both enabled by digital tools, mediate between organizational capabilities and sustainability performance, with firms combining digital investment and green service redesign outperforming those pursuing either strategy alone. Beyond Bali, e-tourism platforms have opened previously isolated destinations to global markets, as demonstrated in the Albanian town of Belsh, where platform access transformed the economic viability of a rural destination lacking conventional tourism infrastructure. Digital inclusion, the authors argue, can function as a spatial equity mechanism when designed to reach peripheral communities rather than concentrating capability in established hubs.

The third domain, community resilience, captures the capacity of host communities to absorb shocks, adapt to change, and transform in response to shifting environmental and economic conditions. The synthesis identifies economic resilience, including household income diversification, local ownership of tourism assets, and financial reserves, as the strongest predictor of sustainability outcomes, followed by social resilience measured through trust, collective action, and cultural identity, and then ecological resilience. A systematic review of institutional barriers to community-based tourism governance identifies six categories of constraint, legal, financial, informational, organizational, political, and cultural, with legal and financial barriers consistently the most binding. This implies that effective support for community resilience requires structural changes in land tenure, access to finance, and legal recognition of community enterprises, not merely capacity-building programs. Heritage-based community tourism offers strong supporting evidence: communities with strong cultural heritage governance institutions achieve better sustainability outcomes than those where heritage management is left to commercial operators, because community control allows sustainability norms to be embedded directly into the visitor experience.

To translate the framework into practice, the authors propose a four-phase implementation roadmap. Phase one, policy alignment and diagnosis, uses multi-stakeholder governance audits to identify binding institutional restrictions and establish SDG baselines; the Labuan Bajo case shows what happens when this diagnostic stage is skipped. Phase two deploys e-tourism platforms, AI-enabled analytics, and smart destination technologies, with the governance imperative that digital investments be driven by sustainability management needs rather than technology supply pushes, and co-designed with community stakeholders. Phase three, community empowerment and co-creation, engages communities as active governance actors, activating cultural heritage assets and strengthening participatory planning. Phase four establishes monitoring, upscaling, and replication through KPI-based systems tracking policy coherence metrics, digital capability indices, and community resilience indicators alongside conventional sustainability measures. The framework aligns its outcome architecture with SDG 8 on decent work, SDG 11 on sustainable communities, SDG 12 on responsible consumption, and SDG 13 on climate action, providing an accountability structure connecting destination-level decisions with global commitments.

The authors are candid about the framework’s limits. GTTM is offered as a conceptual and taxonomic synthesis, not a statistically weighted composite index; the underlying literature reports indicators with heterogeneous definitions, units, and instruments, precluding direct aggregation. The central claim of joint reinforcement is presented as a working hypothesis consistent with predominantly cross-sectional and qualitative evidence, and establishing causality will require longitudinal research designs that track destinations over extended periods. The ten destinations examined in depth, from Bali and Labuan Bajo to rural Serbia, Albania, Egypt’s Red Sea, and luxury-destination contexts, remain a non-representative sample, and the framework has not been tested in small island states, post-conflict destinations, or hyper-commodified mass tourism settings. The authors also flag a political dimension the technical literature tends to avoid: governing the green transition means redistributing power and economic value from incumbent airlines, hotel chains, and fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure owners toward communities and ecological stewardship institutions, a process that generates resistance no measurement framework alone can overcome. Still, the paper’s conclusion is unambiguous. The green transition in tourism is a structural imperative, and the costs of inaction, environmental, social, and competitive, exceed the costs of governance transformation. The transition must be governed, the authors write, and it must be governed well.

Subject of Research: A conceptual framework for measuring the green transition in tourism through policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience

Article Title: Measuring the green transition in tourism: A conceptual framework integrating policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience for sustainable destination management

Article References: Ridho, H., Thamrin, H., Nasution, S., Purba, A. M., & Saragih, M. W. (2026). Measuring the green transition in tourism: A conceptual framework integrating policy coherence, digital innovation, and community resilience for sustainable destination management. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101519. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101519

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101519

Keywords: sustainable tourism, green transition, policy coherence, digital innovation, community resilience, destination management, smart tourism, SDGs, low-carbon tourism, governance indicators, Labuan Bajo, Bali

The study’s central concept is ritual reconfiguration: the deliberate and often negotiated reorganization of a dance’s sacred elements as its social setting changes. Rather than treating sacredness as a fixed substance that either survives or evaporates under modernization, the researchers frame it as a relationship between movement, space, participants, and meaning. When any of those elements shifts—when a dance that once accompanied funerary rites is performed at a tourism festival, for example—the community must decide which components carry spiritual weight and which can be adapted for display. The comparative approach is key to the argument: by placing a Chinese ethnic minority tradition alongside a Balinese court-derived dance, the authors show that the pressures of secularization, heritage designation, and cultural tourism produce remarkably parallel processes in very different religious and political environments.

Xiangxi, in the western part of China’s Hunan Province, is home to a large Miao population whose Drum Dance has long served communal and ceremonial purposes. In traditional settings, the drum functioned as more than an instrument; it was widely understood as a medium of communication with ancestors and a device for organizing communal life, from seasonal celebrations to rites marking life transitions. The dance vocabulary—vigorous, percussive, and performed by both men and women in distinct styles—was embedded in village events where the boundary between performer and participant was porous. Elders, family members, and neighbors gathered around the drum, and the performance’s efficacy depended partly on who was watching, who was dancing, and why. Sacredness in this context was distributed across the event rather than concentrated in the choreography alone.

The Legong dance presents a strikingly different starting point. Developed in the royal courts of Bali and historically performed by pre-adolescent girls trained in secluded contexts, Legong is inseparable from the island’s dense ritual calendar, in which dance offerings are presented at temple ceremonies and believed to please the gods and maintain cosmic balance. Balinese performing arts operate within a cosmology in which aesthetics and religion are not separable domains: a beautifully executed dance is itself a form of devotion. Yet Legong has also become one of Bali’s most exportable cultural symbols, performed nightly for tourists in Ubud and other centers, taught in conservatories, and adapted for international touring companies. The question the study poses is not whether this transformation happened, but how Balinese dancers, teachers, and religious authorities have explained and managed it.

The research draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with performers and cultural custodians, and analysis of how each tradition has been catalogued and promoted as intangible cultural heritage. Heritage designation, the study emphasizes, is a crucial hinge in both cases. When a practice enters national or international heritage lists, it is described, standardized, and documented in ways that inevitably alter its transmission. Movements are codified, costumes are preserved as canonical, and lineages of teachers are recorded. This documentation can protect a tradition from extinction, but it also encourages a view of the dance as a bounded text rather than a living ritual event. In both Xiangxi and Bali, the study finds, communities have responded to this tension by distinguishing between the dance as heritage—something that can be taught, staged, and preserved—and the dance as rite, something that requires proper time, place, and intention.

One of the study’s most interesting findings concerns the strategies of reframing that performers use to keep sacredness intact within secular performance. In Xiangxi, some drum-dance practitioners describe stage performances as a form of cultural representation that honors, rather than replaces, the ritual drumming reserved for ceremonies. The sacred dimension is relocated from the specific performance to the tradition as a whole: dancing for tourists becomes an act of keeping Miao identity alive, which is itself framed in quasi-vocational, almost devotional terms. In Bali, a similar logic operates through the concept of offering. Dancers and teachers often maintain that performing Legong anywhere—even in a hotel courtyard—can constitute an offering if performed with the correct dedication and attitude, because the Balinese framework treats art itself as a channel to the divine. In both cases, sacredness is not abandoned but re-anchored, shifted from external conditions to internal disposition.

The comparison also reveals differences that matter. Balinese dance traditions operate within a still-vigorous living religion, where temple ceremonies continue to demand ritual performance and where priests, temples, and family compound associations provide institutional anchors for the sacred. Legong dancers may perform on stage one night and in a temple ceremony the next, and the two settings remain clearly differentiated even when the choreography is similar. The Miao Drum Dance, by contrast, has experienced heavier disruption from historical upheavals, population displacement, and the erosion of the ceremonial contexts in which it once functioned. For many Xiangxi practitioners, the stage is no longer a secondary venue but the primary one, which makes the work of reframing more difficult and more urgent. The study argues that this asymmetry helps explain why Balinese discourse about sacred performance appears more settled, while Miao discourse remains more actively contested.

Tourism emerges in the research as a double-edged force. On one hand, tourist demand has generated economic incentives that keep young people training in traditions that might otherwise thin out; festival stages, cultural tourism zones, and heritage showcases provide livelihoods and public visibility. On the other hand, market pressures push toward abbreviation, spectacle, and the exaggeration of visually striking elements at the expense of ritual sequencing and symbolic content. The study documents how both communities have developed internal mechanisms of quality control—master teachers who insist on correct technique and etiquette, elders who adjudicate what may be shown to outsiders, and in Bali, religious authorities who determine what is appropriate for temple versus stage. These gatekeepers, the authors suggest, are the true agents of ritual reconfiguration: the process is not imposed from outside by states or tourist boards, but managed from within, unevenly and sometimes contentiously.

The article’s broader theoretical contribution lies in its challenge to the authenticity discourse that still dominates much heritage policy and public discussion. Scholars and officials often ask whether a performed tradition is still authentic, implying a binary between pristine original and corrupted copy. The study’s answer is that authenticity is the wrong measure. Sacredness, in the cases examined, behaves less like a substance and more like a frame—something communities actively construct through intention, discourse, and practice. A drum dance can be both an ancestor-honoring rite and a national festival number; a Legong can be both a temple offering and a ticketed show, and the frame can shift from one performance to the next. What matters is who holds the authority to define the frame, and whether the community that owns the tradition retains that authority or cedes it to external actors.

The implications extend well beyond Xiangxi and Bali. As intangible cultural heritage programs multiply worldwide and cultural tourism becomes a pillar of rural economies, communities everywhere are negotiating similar boundaries between the sacred and the displayable. The study offers a vocabulary for those negotiations, and a caution: policies that freeze traditions into museum-ready versions may inadvertently strip them of the very flexibility that has allowed ritual dances to survive centuries of change. The Drum Dance of the Miao and the Legong of Bali endure, the research concludes, precisely because they have always been reconfigured—by courts, migrations, religions, and now heritage regimes—without losing their capacity to mean. Sacredness, in the end, is not what a dance loses on stage; it is what a community insists on carrying with it there.

Subject of Research: Ritual reconfiguration and the reframing of sacredness in the Xiangxi Miao Drum Dance and Balinese Legong Dance

Article Title: Reframing sacredness: ritual reconfiguration in Xiangxi Miao Drum Dance and Balinese Legong Dance

Article References: Reframing sacredness: ritual reconfiguration in Xiangxi Miao Drum Dance and Balinese Legong Dance. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-08996-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-08996-x

Keywords: sacredness, ritual reconfiguration, Miao Drum Dance, Legong Dance, intangible cultural heritage, Bali, Xiangxi, cultural tourism, dance ethnography, heritage performance, performing arts, religious ritual