numbers game or counting

[Grkovich, Alex]

Yes, this is the point: It is REPEATED counts that are important, not a
single "July 4th" or "July 1st" (in English-speaking Canada), that produces
valuable or meaningful data.

And I didn't mean to infer that I think counts are useless (re my reference
to "94 Pearl Crescents"); it isn't that at all. What bothers me is the
brainwashing that is going on, at least here in some parts of New England,
that is teaching unsuspecting individuals that the recording of the EXACT
number is the essence of the science. I had one fellow tell me, last summer,
that he "doesn't care about whether there are two Little Wood Satyrs or
not", that he "only watches and counts them." Another fellow reported to me
personally that he saw "600 Canadian Tiger Swallowtails" while on a weekend
trip into northern New Hampshire". Well, I wondered, did he see them over
the course of an hour, a half day, the whole weekend, and was it up and down
a quarter mile of highway or backroad, across the county, or over the entire
northern half of the State? Such data, of what usefulness or worth is it? I
never did get an answer. This is what is going on, at least around here.
Such people seem to be being mislead, and willingly, it would appear.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Kenelm Philip [SMTP:fnkwp at aurora.alaska.edu]
> Sent:	Thursday, May 02, 2002 4:20 AM
> To:	leps-l at lists.yale.edu
> Subject:	RE: numbers game or counting
> 
> 
> 	Back in the late 60s I got interested in temporal dissociation
> in the genus _Boloria_ (s.l.) in Interior Alaska. For 4 successive summers
> I made repeated trips to a local spruce bog which (conveniently) had a
> network of old cat trails through it--and supported six species of
> _Boloria_. I laid out a standard transect along the cat trails, which
> took about an hour to traverse. By this time I had learned the six species
> well enough that I could ID them at a distance in most cases.
> 
> 	Every clear day during the summer (unless I was up at Eagle
> Summit or some other such site) I made a midday swing through the bog
> and recorded the number of each species seen, which was also the number
> seen per hour. This was not a very lush habitat--the counts ranged from
> zero to 25 per hour. Plotted as histograms, each of the more abundant
> species tended to have a triangular plot over its flight period (except
> for '_titania_', which had a long end-of-season flight and a more
> trapezoidal plot), which gave me some confidence that the data were
> reliable.
> 
> 	It was these counts that gave me confidence that _B. chariclea_
> and _B. 'titania_' were behaving as two different taxa in Interior Alaska,
> with quite different flight periods in the bogs, in addition to the odd-
> numbered year flight of _chariclea_ and the every-year flight of
> '_titania_'.
> 
> 	But I also concluded that repeated counts by the same person over
> the same transect produced meaningful data, provided the person tried to
> use the same procedure each time. I also feel that this sort of count is
> far more useful than a one-day-per-summer count involving numerous people
> and a number of sites.
> 
> 							Ken Philip
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
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