“It’s a simple mark and recapture study. “ That’s what Bull--the fish biologist--told me in his oh so condescending manner. Problem is there’s no such thing as a simple mark and recapture study. Not in my world.
Mark and recapture means you capture animals, mark them so you can identify them, release them and then see if you can recapture them. Then you do a whole bunch of cool stats to figure out population density.
Simple.
If you’re a fish biologist.
They capture the fish by sticking a wand in the water and electrocuting them! How hard can it be to catch a stunned fish? Newsflash! I can’t run around the woods, wave my magic wand and stun a bunch of small mammals. I can’t sprinkle fairy dust and put them all to sleep. I can’t sing to them and have them clean my house and make me dresses out of curtains either! No, I have to supply them with food and lodging and hope my motel six for rodents looks and smells inviting. And I have to set up hotels all over the forest. I have to give them options. I have to develop a little rodent city!
I knew this, but wanted to get all the facts before I--the wussy bear bio--said, “Can’t be done.” So I consulted the mark and recapture gods and they told me that to do what needed to be done, I’d have to set 900 traps on each study site. All of these traps would need to be checked twice a day. TWICE! Pile on top of that the fact that we had nine study sites...that gives us 8100 traps! Are you kidding me? I don’t have a budget big enough to buy the traps, let alone hire a crew to check them all.
So I came up with plan B.
Because my research group insisted on small mammals, I set up forty traps at each site, thinking this would give us some idea of the species we were working with. And it was what my budget could handle. I hired a crew of three and we KILLED ourselves to set and check these traps. At the end of the season, when I proved to everyone that small mammals had no value in this study, Bane yelled at me.
“I don’t understand why you insisted on doing small mammals if you knew it wasn’t going to work. And why the hell did you spend so much money on traps we can’t use anymore? Why didn’t you attempt a scaled down version to test things before going all out!”
Oh yes she did.
TSWB
