Second -- I'm a fisheries researcher, in fact one that studies food
habits and food-web interactions, and I can tell you that we can predict
what bass will eat, but only with very fuzzy, probabilistic accuracy.
And when they're stocked into waters where they didn't evolve, something
that's happening all over the world, even our fuzzy, probabilistic
answers aren't worth a hill of beans. Further, our knowledge of WHY
they eat what they do is really bad -- the big hurdle in predicting what
they'll eat in a new environment. If you want to hear some good
argument, get academic ecologists going about optimal foraging theory --
but brush up on your calculus and dynamic programming first.
Third -- As for "And I helped pay for this . . .": For what this study
cost you might be able to purchase the toilet paper used by the military
in Iraq for one day, or maybe not. You certainly couldn't afford the
various political mailers sent by our senators and congressmen at our
expense through their franking privileges. I'm not Mormon, but that can
make me an Irate Atheist!
Cheers,
Tom Martin
Irate Mormon wrote:
> I not unnerstan'. Most tongue in cheek stuff is wasted on me! I took this
> test one time and I was told I was practical to a fault :-) But how does
> this illuminate biological principles or help us understand how the food web
> works? It's just knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and maybe 1/2 dozen
> people on the planet probably read the paper AND understood the mathematics.
>
> We already know what bass eat. Now we can predict whether a prey item of
> size x moving on velocity vector y at distance z is likely be sucked into a
> bass's mouth. WeeHaaa! And I helped pay for this...
>
> -Irate
>
> "He says there's no doubt about it, it was the myth of fingerprints.
> I've seen them all and man, they're all the same." - Paul Simon
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>
>> Because it explains the biology of an organism of interest, explaining how
>> food webs work at the retail level.
>>
>
> [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/ms-tnef which had a name of winmail.dat]
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