snip "would you say that typically, books written by an expert contains a better ratio of true:false information than your everyday faceless schmuck on the internet, with zero credentials and an indeterminate amount of experience?"endsnip

Given that I have been collecting herp books for 30 years, I have to say that to a fair extent, it is often the same. Often the information that ends up being the most circulated by the "nameless" people on the net tends to be stuff that was collected out of a book at one point and never checked for accuracy. In some cases the information was the best available at that time or from a site that has never been updated....
For example, a large portion of the misinformation about rodent diets and frogs can be traced back to a few books such as (at least older editions of) The Horned Frog Family and African Bullfrogs. The information about not feeding rodents to Horned frogs was due to some preliminary ideas from Dr. Kevin Wright (Amphibian Medicine and Captive Husbandry) that later information did not support (and was changed for Amphibian Medicine and Captive Husbandry) yet this idea is firmly entrenched among the average hobbyist.. (you can search this forum going back at least three years for repeated discussions over this topic).

With many of the books, particuarly some of the less expensive series, the authors are not experts in those animals but are simply contracted to write the books..... There is no requirement that they be an expert in an animal or animals or even have to have worked with a species to write about it...

I will end this with one positive point, IN GENERAL, the quality of information that is becoming available today is often much better than it was 20 or 30 years ago...


Ed

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