"Cave Life of Oklahoma and Arkansas: Exploration and Conservation of
Subterranean Biodiversity." G. O. Graening, Danté B. Fenolio, and
Michael E. Slay. University of Oklahoma Press (Animal Natural History
Series), Norman; 2011. ISBN 978-0-8061-4223-4. 6 by 9 inches, 226
pages, hardbound. $59.95.
This small but expensive book is sort of a hybrid between an
introduction to cave biology and its conservation in the area and a
formal contract report for the Subterranean Biodiversity Project. A
casual reader can get a pretty good notion about the principles of
cave biology from parts of the text and the color photos, but he'll
have to put up with an awful lot of pedantry and pseudo-science along
the way, because the book is very heavily biased toward the report
aspect. The authors have compiled an extensive record of animals seen
in caves in Oklahoma and Arkansas, with 1355 taxa listed, 690 to the
species level, in Appendix A. Much of the data resulted from generally
brief visits to a large number of caves, where eyeball searches were
used. But a considerable amount was obtained from extensive surveys of
literature, from scientific papers to caving-club magazines. The
authors recognize that this has resulted in a rather unsystematic
database of a pretty random collection of observations, but that
doesn't discourage them from applying lots of statistics. The actual
scientific value of the book is the list of fauna and the caves in
which they were observed, which in principle makes it possible to at
least create distribution maps. However, that won't be easy in
practice, because they've elected to put the distribution data in
Appendix B, which is the list of caves and the serial numbers of the
taxa in Appendix A that were seen in each of them. That means that to
find out where a given species has been found one must search for its
number throughout that fifteen-page Appendix B. It would have been a
whole lot better to number the caves, not the taxa, and list the cave
numbers for each taxon in Appendix A, with just the names (or, often,
just cave-survey numbers) of the caves in numerical order in Appendix B.
The authors seem to think they were being paid by the number of
literature citations they could cram into the text, and so the
innocent reader is subjected, for example, to numerous citations for
things that are common knowledge about biospeleology and can be found
in any introduction to the subject. It's a rare paragraph that doesn't
have several intrusive citations. Some pedantry, such as a half-page
list of the collecting permits the project had, is easy to skip over,
but then there are things like the information that they used "Access
2007 (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Washington)." Who cares what database
they used? Who else makes Access? How many Microsofts are there?
The pseudo-science comes in when the authors apply statistical
techniques to their data, despite its acknowledged limitation and
biases. For example, for each site they recorded qualitative data such
as how extensively it is visited, lightly, moderately, or heavily.
Then they applied a statistical test to see whether this "affects"
species richness. In this case, they find that the most heavily
visited caves have the greatest biological diversity, to their
surprise, but this is just because cavers prefer to visit longer
caves. Correlation is not causation. They fit curves to scatter plots
of things like site richness versus site length, even though there is
no theoretical reason to expect the data to fit that particular form
of equation. In one case, they fit both linear and exponential
functions to the same data, displaying the best-fit coefficients to
four allegedly significant digits with no confidence intervals. Both
fits give p < .0001. What p is that? I doubt the authors know; it just
fell out of the software. The mathematical qualifications of the
authors may be judged by the statement that the number of taxa found
at a site tends to increase exponentially with the number of specimens
collected.
In truth, there is a good bit of useful information buried in this
book, and I suppose even a lay reader who is not as easily annoyed as
I am could learn some things from it. But I shudder to think of the
graduate students who will accept this book as a good style guide for
their theses and dissertations. It is an excellent example of what
happens when somebody carelessly leaves statistics software lying
around where anybody can get at it.--Bill Mixon
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The winner of the rat race is still a rat.
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