Posted by:
Aaron
at Sun Jul 11 20:01:32 2010 [ Report Abuse ] [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Aaron ]
You keep ingnoring several very significant things 1) Hunters do not have access to any of that habitat except for the tiny percentage(.03 to 1.66%) that consists of roadwyay. In 12 years I have hunted alterna in that area, not once have I seen or even heard of anybody leaving the main paved road to walk or drive that area. 2) The road is not home for the subocs. They are only on the road for short periods of time. 3) Most hunters do not specifically hunt that stretch of road, they only pass through it on their way to habitat that is better for their main quarry, alterna and/or lepidus.
There are also some huge flaws with your baseball analogy. First of all the number of subocs is not fixed. They are contiuously breeding and replenishing the supply. Second, and actually the biggest factor, the area that is not hunted is plenty large enough to support many, many colonies of subocs that will never ever in their entire lives venture onto the road. Even if every blonde that crossed that road got taken there are many times more reproducing away the road that never cross it and their offspring form the basis for new ones to cross the road.
No I did not read any of those studies because I highly doubt they take into account the fact that well over 90% of the habitat we are talking about never gets hunted. If you think there is anything in those studies that would override that factor you are free to paraphrase it here.
Also, 34 square miles was the minimum. The maximum was 140 square miles. When talking about hunting, 34 square miles is absolutly not a small area. One would have to do it on foot first of all. Second have you considered how many miles one would have to walk on foot to actually cover that amount of terrain? It would not be a matter of simply walking in a straight line for 34 miles. A mile is about 5,000 feet long. A hunter can only see for about 10 feet on either side. To actually cover the area one would would have to walk a grid of paths, approxiamately 20 feet apart. 5,000 feet divided by 20 =250. That means to thoroughly cover one square mile in 20 foot increments by foot a hunter would actually have to walk over 250 liniar miles. That's just to cover one square mile. Now multiply that by 34 = 8,500 linear miles. That's the minimum. 140 square miles would be, 35,000 miles. And because the subocs would actually be hiding most of the time one would have to walk the grid repeatedly. Not only that they'd have to repeat the walk faster than the whole population could reproduce itself. Not only that, the less dense the population gets, the faster you'd have to repeat the grid. Has it not become ludicrous at this point?
But as I said hunters are not hunting the whole area, they are only hunting the road. Which means the subocs would be the ones that would have to travel those linear miles. In other words the road becomes the epicenter of opposition. The pressure from taking blondes off that that one stretch of road would have to be greater than the reproductive output of the entire number of blondes thoughout the whole area. Normals would have to flow outwards from the road and permeate the entire area. And they would have to do it faster than the blonde gene could be reproduced. It's just not possible.
Lastly you said hunters have been collecting blondes from that stretch of road for about 60 years. I know of one blonde found this year, on the road. That means in 60 years of hunting that road, the blonde gene has not even suffered enough pressure to have even been erased from the area immeadiatly adjacent to the road, let alone cause a ripple effect throughout the rest of the area. The pressure from normals is already immense, yet the blondes continue to reproduce. Hunters taking a few blondes per year off that road is not going to be the force that tips the scale for the entire area.
And we have not even discussed how many hets are out there, which as you said people are not taking hets near as much as they take the blondes. The remaining hets immeadiately adjacent to the road are going to be passing on the blonde gene to those away from the road.
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