Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
uninformative at best and ludicrous at worst. Of the reasonably quantifiable variables,
only “hunting success” rate was known with any certainty in these areas, but success rate
was almost identical among the three areas. Alas, argali density, the only variable with
an unambiguous and continuous value (and the parameter accorded the greatest weight
in the scoring scheme), was adopted uncritically from undocumented sources, with no
consideration whatsoever given to its attendant uncertainty.
15
Related to premature categorization is the tendency among Chinese wildlife scien-
tists to ascribe fixed properties to observed biological phenomena that are actually only
meaningful within the context of a particular time, a particular environment, and a par-
ticular management regime. We saw this in Chapter 2 with the frequent use of the term
“overgrazing” without critical examination of exactly what this meant. Implicit in this
categorization was the concept that any given pasture has a set grazing capacity below
which grasslands are healthy and above which they are degraded. Further, the determina-
tion of grazing capacities from one-time studies (and the subsequent failure to monitor
rangeland trends) implies an unstated belief that the capacity to sustain grazing pressure
is a fundamental property of any given pasture, which, once determined, need not be
confirmed through continued observation.
Another example is the prominence given in Chinese mammalogy to the life table. A
life table is a device, borrowed from life-insurance actuaries, in which the probability
of death at any given age is tabulated, allowing for computation of such statistics as ex-
pectation of further life or characterization of mortality patterns by age. Combined with
estimates of fecundity, and, critically, depending on the way in which mortality rates are
estimated, a life table can also be used to understand a population's growth rate.
But applied to wild populations, life tables are not representations of species' inher-
ent properties, but rather are tools to understand what happened to a specific wildlife
population under a specific set of circumstances. The same species can experience
substantially different vital rates depending on the environmental conditions to which
it is exposed (including its own density, and of course, the rate of removal by humans).
Indeed, understanding how the vital rates of any given population differ from that of
another population of the same species is one of the fundamental objectives of wildlife
biology. Yet the Chinese literature is crowded with attempts to provide “
the
life table” for
mammalian species, as though each had a characteristic one, as fundamental to its iden-
tity as its number of chromosomes.
16
Each individual study and life table—if interpreted
appropriately given the genesis of its data—is a possibly useful case study, but because
they are not treated as such (crucial context is rarely provided), but rather as though they
are advances in fundamental mammalogy, they are generally useless.
My final example is worth recounting because it exemplifies the myopia that often
characterizes many Chinese wildlife scientists as they endeavor to become expert in some
minute portion of the field, or to make a name for themselves by developing some new
technique. During a study of a chiru calving ground in summer 1999, a team of biologists
came upon the sad scene of a recently perpetrated poaching incident, but wisely decided
to use the opportunity to learn what they could from the many carcasses available to
them. Determining the age of animals (older than calves of the year) can be difficult, and
Search WWH ::
Custom Search