ES100/Critique of Scientific Paper Exercise part 2

Paul Borokhov ES 100 : Paper critique

Introduction: provided a decent background on herbicide-prairie animal interactions and a motivation for performing the study. However, it would have been worthwhile to explain to uninitiated readers the relationship between gophers, prairie dogs, and voles so provide more context for the earlier studies.

Methods: it’s not entirely clear why the seventh pair was not introduced from the very beginning of the study. Overall, the methods seem sound, though it is unclear why just the active salt of the pesticide was used, instead of applying the pesticide itself.

Results: the mention of Krebs et al. observing high numbers of voles in enclosures gives me some pause about the appropriateness of the grid sizes used in the study. There was no mention anywhere of typical “in-the-wild” vole population densities and whether the smaller size of the grids could have had any effect on the results.