Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Here is a link to the PNAS article the media are having a field day with. Quite frankly I'm surprised this article made it into PNAS, which is a very well known and distinguished journal. For a typical PNAS article, its pretty light in terms of data and it seems to me the crux of the paper is purely supposition. Yes they are seeing a decrease in mammals on their road cruises. I would have very much liked to have seen them report the number of Burms they saw on said cruises since they are hypothesizing the burms are eating the mammals it would stand to reason they should be seeing lots of burms on the roads in areas where mammal populations have fallen (if the burms are the culprits here). Bot showing any burm data leads me to believe the numbers are not that strong and would probably hurt their case and if I was reviewing this article I certainly would have asked for this data.
Link

I read the article and reached a similar conclusion. The surveying for the Burms seemed legit. The surveying for the mammals is common practice, and acceptable. But using the data from one to explain the results of the latter is tenuous at best. Albeit, I am possibly biased.
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25 year old 0.1 from Lincoln, NE
Ball Pythons - 0.1 Pastel, 1.0 Pastel het Pied, 0.1 Pied, 0.1 Cinn, 1.0 Black Pewter, 1.0 Woma (hidden gene?), 0.1 Yellowbelly, 2.1 Normals
Kingsnakes - 1.0 L. m. thayeri, 0.1 L. m. thayeri X L. alterna, 1.0 L. g. californiae
Other - 0.1 Whitesided P. catenifer sayi, 1.0 H. nascicus, ?.? Chrysemys picta, 0.1 crazy cat, 1.0 husband

Look at the first, third and fourth authors and you have your answer as to how such a stupid correlation could be made

To be fair. He explains himself further.
He explains that they coincide and are not necessarily the result of one to the other.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-mazzotti/pythons-everglades-study_b_1257911.html
Link

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Ritchie Luna
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