By Steve Bunk, 1-27-11
All the information out there, informed and uninformed, surely has
raised awareness that wolves are important to many of us, whether by
their presence or absence. But how good are we at recognizing and using
accurate information to shape our opinions?
As a former science journalist, what’s become clear in the cacophony
regarding wolves in the West is that where emotion rules, research
should.
For six years, I wrote about biological research for scientific trade
journals. I can’t use a Bunsen burner or a radio collar to save my life,
but one thing I did learn is how the scientific method works. Through
countless interviews with scientists across this country and around the
world, I came to understand that the way scientists analyze and try to
solve problems is much different from how you and I might do it.
Their method, developed over centuries, has definable steps, builds upon
what others have done, and causes changes in accepted thinking that
often occur very slowly, against great resistance. Good science is
inherently a conservative endeavor. If a study method is flawed, its
results can be questioned.
For example, the number of individuals in a given study could be too
small to provide a statistically significant result. The study might not
last long enough, or it could have inadequate follow-up. Perhaps there
are no controls, such as groups that are not treated, say, with an
experimental drug, or are unaffected by some other situation being
investigated.
Any number of other shortcomings can make the results of a study
debatable. The public should have a general awareness of such things. If
it’s technical, we don’t expect to understand all of it, but we sure
can look for the presence or absence of key indicators.
When you look at all the talk about wolves, relatively little of it
concerns the most well-informed, rigorous, reliable information we have.
Some of the world’s leading scientific research on wolves has come from
universities in the Rocky Mountains. One needs to look no farther than
Montana State University at Bozeman, where ecologists have produced a
complex and subtle picture of elk-wolf interactions.
For years, these researchers studied five elk populations and monitored
wolves. Among many discoveries, they learned that concentrations of the
female hormone progesterone are lower in elk where wolves are more
numerous, and that these lower concentrations correspond to fewer calves
born. This revelation, which indicates that the mere presence of wolves
can affect elk reproduction, is one of several “risk effects,” which
are a unifying theme of the group’s multifaceted research. In this case,
the risk effect is that while elk change their behavior to avoid
predation by wolves—including where they graze and how much nutrition
they subsequently get—these changes also can carry costs to the welfare
of the species.
The Montana group’s leader, ecology professor Scott Creel,
won the 2010 Carl Gustaf Bernhard Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences for this work. Yes, the same group that awards several of
the Nobel Prizes. Yet for many folks, the take-away message of Creel’s
research was that he seemed to be anti-wolf. After all, his work showed
that wolves scare elk into the mountains, where the cows sometimes can’t
get enough good nutrition to produce offspring.
Late last year, Creel the wolf-hater became Creel the wolf-lover. It began when he and Jay J. Rotella published a scientific paper
in September that analyzed the relationship between gray wolf
populations and human killings of the animals. The paper mentions that
under a hunting proposal submitted to the federal government by
Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP), the state’s wolf
population would incur a decline “substantially greater” than the 13
percent predicted by the agency.
In December, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported
it had obtained a copy of a letter from an FWP official to the
university’s president complaining about Creel’s findings. The
official, Dave Risley, who heads the agency’s Fish and Wildlife Division
in Helena, later complained to a reporter that Creel had not contacted
FWP researchers when “selectively” using the agency’s data in his study,
and charged a lack of professional integrity. The university backed
Creel’s peer-reviewed work.
The paper is a meta-analysis, which means it uses established
statistical methods to examine all the relevant, scientific data on wolf
population growth, total wolf deaths and those deaths caused by humans.
What Creel and Rotella discovered was that the prevailing opinion,
among not only governmental authorities but also other wildlife
biologists, concerning how many wolves could be killed by humans without
destabilizing a given population was higher than that indicated by the
data. The study is a tool for wolf management.
The biologist who is also an accomplished statistician is rare. The
paper by Creel and Rotella ends with a reminder relevant to this point.
“Finally,” it says, “these results highlight the ongoing need to fully
incorporate quantitative analysis of available data in the development
of conservation and management policies.”
The misunderstanding by the general public of these scientists’ work is
far from unusual. Scientists are the best sources of information about
the world around us, yet too often what they discover and report is
drowned in a flood of poorly informed opinion. If we want to understand
wolves, and not just emote about them, we have to understand what the
biologists are learning. That’s discernment. That’s what wise
consumption of information should be about.
You can get opinion at the coffee shop with your doughnut, and it can be
fun to have. But if we vilify scientists because what they discover
doesn’t suit our preconceptions, then our amazing access to information
nowadays becomes threatened by the curse of irrelevance.
Essays in the Range blog are not written by High Country News. The authors are
solely responsible for the content.
Originally posted at NewWest.net
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
