Subject: Ehrlich experiment: not the reference....

From: Kenelm Philip <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 20:15:23 -0900

Thomas Slone suggests that the paper 'Estimating the effects of
scientific study on two butterfly populations' is the real reference to
the experiment that Paul Ehrlich told me about in 1994. Apparently Slone
missed (or disagrees with?) my earlier posting in which I listed that paper
as one of the references that had been suggested, and (with the paper in
front of me at the time) stated that it did _not_ refer to Ehrlich's
'collecting to extinction' experiment. According to what Ehrlich told me,
the experiment involved massive collecting over a single summer, rather
than sampling over a 22-year period (and it is clear from the paper that
the sampling was not massive enough to be expected to have any particular
impact).
        Either the 1964 or 1965 event where Ehrlich and cohorts tried
deliberately to overcollect the population sounds like the experiment he
described to me. When Ehrlich returns from Costa Rica in two weeks or so
I shall try to get something from him via e-mail about all this--but in
the mean time it looks as if the 1975 paper in Science is the one with a
reference to this experiment. Of course, there is always the possibility
that he made a separate experiment which was never published at all...

                                                        Ken Philip
[email-masked]