NOTE: If you do not want your serenity disturbed DO NOT READ

[Paul Cherubini]

Stan, Chris Kline of the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Superior, Arizona
explained the following in a post to  SoWestLep at yahoogroups.com
today:

"the only role that Mr. Cherubini has played with our Southwest
Monarch Study was that he was the lucky pup that was made
aware of this blue tag.  The prior posting [Bob Pyle's posting below]
made our Arizona project sound like some "waste of time,
misconcieved bunch of chimps" that Mr. Cherubini had
coerced to do this lame exercise.  For the record, Mr. Cherubini
has no involvment with us other than being supportive enough
to look for our tags.  THX  chris"

==============================================
Chris Kline was responding to what Bob Pyle  
<tlpyle at willapabay.org> had written yesturday:

All,

The recovery of a Californian monarch transferred to Arizona for 
release, in Michoacan, is interesting and not unexpected. But it is
worthless as regards any knowledge of what monarchs originating in 
Arizona might or might not actually do. In Chasing Monarchs, and in 
my recent paper with Lincoln Brower in the U of Az Press book on 
Migratory Pollinators and Their Corridors (ed. Gary Nabhan), I 
showed data for monarchs originating in Arizona crossing into 
Mexico, and predicted that Arizona monarchs will be
found in Mexico, at Michoacan or elsewhere. However, 
Cherubini--and we have had this discussion many times before, 
because he just doesn't get it--does NOT illuminate natural 
movements of monarchs by practicing releases based on transfers. 

Understand: a monarch moved from site A to site B and recovered 
at site C says absolutely nothing about what monarchs originating 
at site B do in nature. There is a profound error of logic in 
Cherubini's assumptions.

In fact, it was transfer exercises he took part in decades ago
(these are not experiments--there are no controls), moving Cal. 
monarchs to BC and elsewhere and mapping recoveries, that led 
to the erroneous maps and models which appeared in books and 
articles for more than a generation. I dismissed these in Chasing 
Monarchs and explained why we need maps based on 
unmanipulated distributions. 

If these transfer hijinks of Cherubini's--which are illegal on at least
one level, unethical on others--are mixed in with recoveries of 
naturally occurring monarchs, as his recent map does, a whole 
new series of erroneous conclusions will be promulgated.

Monarch conservation needs clear information on the whereabouts 
and movements of monarchs in the absence of human 
interference. Map dots based on transfers are scientifically 
bankrupt and nothing more than a curiosity.Arizona monarchs
do go to Mexico--as I published in 2000--but this find of a monarch 
monkeyed with by Cherubini does not prove a thing
about real Arizona monarchs. All it says is that a California 
monarch placed in Arizona can arrive in Michoacan. Of some i
nterest, but no great discovery after all, and of no enduring 
value except as an artificial curiosity.

R. M. Pyle

 
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