Today, an extremely well referenced paper and rebuttal was published today by the Chicago Herpetological Society. What the rebuttal and paper do is show the dubious manner in which this “climate envelope” was formed by Rodda et al. (2008 ).
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Barker, D.G. & T. M. Barker. 2008. The Distribution of the Burmese Python,
Python molurus bivittatus. Bull. Chicago Herp. Soc. 43(3): 33-38.
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Barker, D.G. & T. M. Barker. 2008. Comments on a Flawed Herpetological Paper and an Improper and Damaging New Release from a Government Agency. Bull. Chicago Herp. Soc. 43(3): 45-47
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Together these papers show most of the faults in the misleading Rodda et al. (2008 ). I say misleading because they publically insist that the entire paper is predicated on their ‘climate envelope’, not on the biology, natural history or ecology of this species, but then make comments regarding those very topics in the paper itself. Although it will be difficult to undo all the damage that USGS has done misleading the public, the press, the law makers and the government (and someone may have actually broken the law doing so and this is worth an investigation into under the federal Iformation Quality Act, as suggested in the rebuttal). Barker & Barker (2008a) shows that the USGS map of geographical distribution was done in great error (again, contrary to the very references they cite), calls into question where these weather stations were actually located and that the bivittatus taxon should actually be elevated to species status, in other words, you can pretty much throw Rodda et al. (2008 ) in the rubbish bin.
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Of all the things that I see that destroys the credibility of the paper most of all, it is not providing the weather data and the location of the 149 weather stations done in their climate matching and developing their ‘climate envelope’. These weather stations, which form the very foundation of their paper, are not referenced nor were they available when requested. This is from the paper:
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"We don't know what parameters were set in the data analysis because the data are not included in the paper. We emailed a request to authors Rodda and Reed for information about what environmental factors and values were utilized in the analysis. Our requests were unanswered.
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We recommend that it would be a proper action now for the authors to publish the data used in all analyses, including location, elevation, all temperature and climate data, annual and seasonal precipitation, and any other seasonal data. In particular, it would be important to list all analyses that were made, and all changes of the data to achieve each analysis."
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I personally believe this of great importance, because through my earlier investigation into the references showed that there were only a few locations in all the references that they cited and the highest specific location is only 850m! Since they only relied on their references and admitted to not asking anyone for information on them, it is highly doubtful that even half of their 149 weather stations had ever had a Burmese python anywhere near them.
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One thing that I really like about Barker & Barker’s paper is that it was given comments and reviewed (as evident in the acknowledgements) by many names easily recognised throughout the herpetological community. An important question yet to be asked is: Who exactly reviewed Rodda et al. (2008 )??? Whoever it was has not been released and if they are indeed a herpetologist, I sincerely believe that they don’t want their name associated with the paper.
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To Barker and Barker, I would like to say: Job well done. That is how you write a paper. Your papers are well referenced, well written and to the point. You actually sought out people in your references (which Rodda et al. did not do) and even had some of them review your paper.
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To those that would say I might be biased, I will tell them that I have no connection to the US pet, reptile or python trades. In fact, I think the trade of large pythons and dangerous reptiles SHOULD BE REGULATED to keep them out of the hands of the children, teenagers and irresponsible adults. If there is any bias on my part, it is on the side of scientific peer review process; however in the case of the Rodda et al. paper, I just saw too much that was wrong, purely speculative, apparently purposely misleading and not supported by their references. Did I carefully look through and analyze Barker & Barker, like I did Rodda et al.? Yes, Dave Barker was kind enough to send me the paper asking me what I thought of it and I even questioned one item in the paper. Mind you, that is only one item of concern I had (part of one sentence), when in Rodda et al. there were pages worth of concerns, many of which have yet to be addressed. As it turned out, the one item (mangrove habitat) was confirmed by a specific location and from two sources – again, good job!
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Please contact me if you would like a pdf copy of this hard hitting rebuttal and well written paper. Unfortunately, any requests made for the papers after Sunday morning my time (Saturday night your time in the US), may take longer, since I will be away from home.
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Cheers,
Michael
