Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Better, he thought, to comply with the agency's assumed desire to fund research that
promised to answer a large question in a single study. If, in the end, such an effort yielded
data so sparse that little could be made of it, so be it.
WHAT MAKES WILDLIFE SCIENCE DIFFICULT
(BUT FASCINATING)
The key to advancing scientific knowledge quickly is simple: controlled and replicated
experimentation. There are many scientific approaches, but there is little doubt that repli-
cated experiments with controls are the fast lane to reliable knowledge. The reductionism
required in controlled experiments allows factors to be isolated, thus vastly increasing
our power to determine which factors matter and how things operate.
But if one wished to find a polar opposite of “controlled,” one could hardly do bet-
ter than to choose the word “wild.” If what one is studying is truly wild, it is, almost
by definition, impossible to conduct controlled experiments. As if to mock the very
concept of reductionism, the behavior of any given animal is an impossibly complex
function of a myriad of factors (condition of its food supply, condition of the viruses
and bacteria making a living off it, current weather conditions, past weather conditions,
weather conditions affecting its grandmother,
ad infinitum
). In turn, each individual
interacts with conspecifics, competitors, prey, predators, and parasites, yielding even
more variability and complexity in the ultimate object of study in wildlife science—a
wildlife population. Like meteorologists, wildlife biologists are faced with understand-
ing the specific manifestations of a process that is influenced by uncountable sources,
some small and some large, all interacting with one another. Unlike meteorologists,
however, wildlife biologists do not have large systems of monitoring stations that con-
stantly update conditions, providing feedback to continuously improve forecasts. And
as we know, even with such a monitoring network, meteorologists sometimes get the
weather forecast wrong.
Because the object of our study, wildlife populations, are by their nature integrations
of these forces, isolating any one of them, even where possible, can give at best only
partial and contingent information. If we study a population in captivity we can obtain
much more detailed and precise data than if we must go searching for the animals in
their natural habitat. The problem is that any information from captive studies is always
contingent: it says, “assuming the lack of predators, no human hunters, no exposure to
harsh climates, abundant food resources, these animals behave in the following way.”
But understanding how the animals behave in the presence of these factors is the very
thing we want to know. If, alternatively, we pour all our available resources into a very
intensive study of a particular population during a particular (almost certainly relatively
short) time-period, we might obtain detailed and precise information that pertains to these
animals during this time. But what if the animals chosen for study are unlike members
of the same species faced with differing habitat conditions? What if the time-period we
choose for study is unusually wet or dry (or simply insufficiently variable to capture
the extremes which the animals must ultimately cope with)? Again, the information we
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