Just read the new python in the everglades study

[nightrainfalls]

Imagine that you are a scientist, you have just spent a lot of money getting a degree and discovered that for every Jacques Cousteau or Jane Goodall there are hundreds, maybe thousands of poorly paid researchers competing for fewer and fewer grants. Most of these anonymous researchers will toil quietly their whole lives and die in scientific obscurity. You on the other hand have a cushy government job proving that pythons are a danger to the Everglades. Considering that media outlets all over the country are reporting that the python scourge will be spreading into the Tundra, despite the fact the studies show 100% mortality for populations out side of the extreme southern tip of Florida, your job should be pretty easy. After all the public will accept any conclusion regardless of the data, as long as it sounds scary and comes from a scientist.

So you come up with the idea of releasing rabbits into parts of the everglades where there are pythons and no mammalian predators. Then you can release some animals into parts of the everglades where there are no pythons. Since none of the rabbits in the no python area will be killed by pythons, and pythons are the only predators in the python areas you are assured that 0% of the fatalities in your non python area will be from pythons, and all of your fatalities in the python area will be from pythons. You can just point at the difference and say, "see pythons are dangerous." The fact that the study couldn't have any other result is something most people will not notice.

You are so happy with yourself. You can get the predetermined result you need to keep your job. So you catch, tag and release 31 animals. You start tracking your animals and something strange happens. You find a car and it is beeping like your rabbits are inside. You see traps on the front seat. What do you do? The trapper shows up and you ask how many rabbits he has. Turns out he just got three. You have just started your study and already your sample group has been decimated. You ask the trapper to move his traps so he doesn't hurt your study any more. You make a mental note to claim in your paper that the shortage of rabbits in this area is due to pythons. You'll mention the trapper casually, and hope nobody realizes the pythons aren't the only threat to marsh rabbits in this stretch of the everglades. You keep tracking rabbits and over the next few days you lose more of your sample group.

A bird grabs one, and one just disappears. It has been ten days and 5 of your 31 rabbits are already dead. Not a single one by a python. Wow this study is turning into a bust fast. What will you do? That is simple, you have to find a way to exclude the data. You hide it in the supplement in Table S1 and hope no one ever reads it. After all, who reads the supplement. You could tell the truth and explain that you are omitting the first ten days of data from your study because it makes your thesis look profoundly stupid or you could make something up. You choose the later option. You carefully explain that the rabbits where uncomfortable and stressed those first ten days, so the pythons didn't eat them. If the pythons aren't eating the poor bunnies because the bunnies are uncomfortable, it just isn't fair to include those ten inconvenient days in your study.

Good now the fact that 16 % of your animals died from non python deaths in 10 days has been covered up, and the largest source of mortality, your human trapper, has been relocated you can spend the next 11 months waiting for the Pythons to pick off the rest of your rabbits.

TableS1.Numberof marsh rabbits mortalities by category for rabbits living < 10days in Everglades National Park (ENP), and at control and proceduralcontrol sites, from 14 September 2012 to 19 August 2013.

	Endothermic				Ectothermic
	Avian	Mammalian	Unknown	Python		Reptilian (non-python)	Trapping Related		Total
Released-ENP	1	0	1	0		0	3		5
Control	0	2	1	0		0	1		4
Procedural Control	0	2	1	0		3a	0		6

^aAmericanalligator

[Reinz]

Nightrainfalls, thank you for a great walk through! In a past life I had to dissect these type of studies myself. As you showed, it is obvious that they skewed the study to prove their outcome.
Unfortunately it takes a big name peer to make the circuit disputing such trash and educating their peers on study dynamics and ethics.
Will this happen?


Great job!

[nightrainfalls]

@ Reinz Thanks, there is way more, but I got depressed and am spending some quality time with my python Delphi. Part 4 out soon.

[nightrainfalls]

Time to be a scientist again. You have just gotten back from your study sites, and found a way to make many inconvenient deaths disappear. You looking forward to seeing all 15 happy rabbits at your python free procedural control. You are already picturing yourself pointing to the happy rabbits in the python free control and telling an adoring Miami Herald reporter how evil scaly ugly pythons are wiping out these cute fuzzy little mammals. You get in your car and drive to the python free procedural control site. You are already calling it rabbitopia. Those fifteen rabbits are so lucky to be living there. You start up your tracking device and point it at some alligators. They are beeping away. Huh, why are the alligators beeping? You didn't tag alligators. Oh no those damned alligators ate three of your rabbits. And one more rabbit is missing. Worse over there are the remains of two more eaten by some sort of mammal. I has been just ten days and just under half of your control is already dead.

This is a disaster, at this rate by the end of the month, there won't be any rabbits in python free rabbitopia. If your entire procedural control is wiped out your study will be invalid. How can you claim that pythons are destroying rabbit populations when the rabbits in your non python area are all dead in less than month. This is a disaster. At least you have those fifty rabbits you tagged and left in the healthy rabbit colony you raided for rabbits. Maybe they are doing better.

You get to the original rabbit colony and start counting. Four of the fifty are already dead, that is like eight percent in a little over a week. Worse yet, all of them are from non pythons. This study has been going on a little over week and your rabbits have been decimated, or worse, and not a single python fatality. You decide to put all the data in Supplemental Table 1. "People won't read that, you think to yourself and smile.

[nightrainfalls]

The hawks and eagles just finished off the last rabbit in Rabbitopia. Yep 100% fatality rate. All 15 rabbits are dead. Even if the pythons eat all the rabbits in the Python infested ENP sites, all you can prove is that pythons are as effective as mammals and birds and destroying rabbit populations. Worse still the rattle snakes have moved in and made of with three more of your fifty control rabbits, nine more just disappeared. "How does a rabbit just disappear, you wonder to yourself." Then there are the cats, or raccoons, or some type of mammal that just ate 20 of your control rabbits. "Man rabbits die fast", you think to yourself. Still no python attacks in the python infested areas. You hope it warms up soon and those dangerous rabbit exterminating snakes start doing what they do, because right now this study is going entirely to crap.

You really can't believe it. You rigged everything in your favor and it just isn't working out. It will be so embarrassing if rabbits do better in python territory than outside python territory. You will have accidently proven the government wrong and invalidated the official stance on pythons. How will you keep your Job?

[nightrainfalls]

The rabbits are better off with the pythons. 4 out of 31 rabbits survived a year with the snakes. 5 of 65 survived without the snakes. You shake your head in shock. You have to write a paper claiming that pythons wipe out rabbits while somehow making sure that no one notices that 13% of the rabbits in the python infested areas survived while only 7 percent survived outside of the python area. In short, in python infested areas, rabbits are twice as likely to survive for one year, than in non python infested areas.

Time to create some models, calculate statistics, and make some pretty graphs showing how python feeding is related to temperature.

You make a few wildly inaccurate claims, try to make the background as persuasive as possible, and hope no one actually has the attention span to read the paper you write and realize, that you are lying and that you actually proved the opposite of what you are claiming.

Time to call the Miami Herald. There reporters are too stupid to fact check anything.

David

[Reinz]

It's too bad the Gubmint and others would accept such a study without the scrutiny of a strict peer review.

For example many physicians, such as the ones treating y'all will not even consider looking at the results of a medical study unless it has been written up in THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. If it came out of any other journal, it carries no weight with them. That is because The NEJM does not print any junk science, only top peer review stuff.

[Bluebonnet Herp]

I'm in south FL and in some places, actually every place with populations of them, the damn marsh rabbits are everywhere. You know what kills them? A 3 ton box on wheels traveling down a road at 70 mph. I can literally walk for fifteen minutes down the highway/exit ramps areas and see over 20 squished on the side of the road. Not only are people killing the poor things, but careless owners who have released their pet bunnies have cause interspecies breeding. Marsh rabbits are supposed to be brown. I've seen white with spots, grey and black, brown and white, all white, etc. So why aren't bunny rabbits on the Lacey act?
Heck I even have them in my back yard and I used to be the biggest threat to them when I was younger (I tried to catch them, not harm just to clarify). We can't forget that it's rabbits we're talking about, those things that if you leave them in a room for 4 weeks there are suddenly 8 more.


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Actually, as it would turn out, the non-domesticated variety of European rabbit is on the Lacey Act, if my memory serves me right.

[Citrus]

Seriously, someone needs to send this thread to the people trying to get rid of the Lacey act restrictions.

Do people forget that Florida is a state where nothing is native? Everything here was introduced at some point or another. Even the people are all from Northern states or other countries.


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