jeffgillies

Folks, I wrote the article at the beginning of this thread and have since been following the discussion here, which has been pretty great. Mike Connerton, a DEC biologist that co-authored this research and is quoted in the story, sent along some clarifications on a few points like catch rates that have come up here. Without going quite that far, he basically suggested that what I had written was alarmist and premature. Connerton's responses are now included in the article. None of them refute their claim that “predation pressure on the Lake Ontario alewife population may be high enough to raise concerns about long-term stability of this predator–prey system,†a statement which appeared in he and Murry's original research report. But his comments do put more emphasis on the "may" in that quote than my article originally did. His point is that there is a lot of uncertainty involved with the science and that more research needs to happen before any stocking changes happen based on this line of thinking. At this point I doubt I'm telling you anything you don't already know. Jeff [email protected]