numbers game or counting

[Michael Gochfeld]

Ken, I obviously agree with you that the repeated (in his case daily) counts
are useful, and that an individual doing the same thing in the same way is the
optimum.

It would be interesting to see the summer phenology represented as histograms
showing minimal overlap of the species.

Judging from the Azure problem, how would you distinguish (based on field
data)  two non-overlapping, morphologically distinct "species", from one
bi-voltine species exhibiting polyphenism.

Mike Gochfeld

Kenelm Philip wrote:

>         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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