Came across this cool photo of a very spangled plover.
While I had a good idea what it all was, there was unfortunately a lot of ignorance calling it abuse and such. Thankfully there were some well informed responses,and I thought I’d share them with you.
From Mark Medved
Question. How many bands are needed for adequate research? This Piping plover seems to have at least five bands. And why is one not in the form of a ring? Photo by Linda Schwegman
And the most helpful answer from the comments:
“Former” Piping Plover biologist here!
The metal band on the upper portion of her left leg is the standard USGS band that every banded bird in the US receives.
The orange “flag” band on the upper portion of her right leg is an auxiliary band that indicates to the observer that she is part of the Great Lakes Population. This is very important because this particular population is federally endangered and there are only around 90 breeding pairs in the entire Great Lakes.
The three other bands on the lower portion of her legs indicate to the observer exactly which individual this is. Each Great Lakes Piping Plover [ideally] has a unique band combination to distinguish that individual to an observer. There are over 2.8 million possible adult combinations. When we know who is who, we get to know so much more about how they live and how we can help them
Here is a nice poster showing how those flags are used to get info to the correct researcher.
By this method, birds can be identified and tracked without the need for difficult and stressful recapture.
With so few of these birds remaining, there is no way anyone would be allowed to hurt these birds. Bird legs don’t grow like ours. There is not much beyond bone, tendons, and blood vessels in the part of the leg where the bands are attached, so they won’t outgrow them. Each species gets a specific size to ensure a safe fit. They are designed to not cause discomfort or to get snagged on things, and they are very lightweight and make us less than 1% of the bird’s body weight.
For a full writeup of band info for this population of Oliver’s in the Great Lakes region, check out the study’s official website, and you can also donate or even participate in helping save the plovers.
In 1990, the population was down to about 26 birds. Programs like this are the only reason we can tell if preservation methods are working or not, especially with birds like these that migrate great distances.
Uh, yeah, actually.
I have been around long enough now to realize that scientists are human and some.of them care a lot more about publishing papers regardless of their veracity to further their career or taking funding from sources that cause a conflict of intrrest in their research.
🤷♂️
You definitely should not trust “scientists” - we have a whole reproducibility problem because of this thinking.
Much of that issue is one of published papers being used as a metric of success and career building. Plagiarism, paper mills, and publishers that will let things through for money are absolutely problems in scientific journals. A lot of these papers, even after being disproven, still get cited in even further research, perpetuating issues, and we end up with things like with Andrew Wakefield’s anti-vax research still being presented as fact by some today, over 20 years later. When people make careers based on the number of times they are published and not necessarily the quality of their work, people are going to do shady things. This should not give us distrust in all research. There are multitudes more legitimate papers than false ones. And sewing distrust in research hurts funding for further research, some of which is what would be doing peer reviews, making the problem even worse.
To the topic at hand, banding has led to many insights and discoveries with minimal impact on animals. In just the US and Canada, over 77 million birds have been banded, with over 5 million re-encounters reported. Over 1.2 million birds, again, just in US/Canada alone, are banded each year. Countless discoveries and insights have resulted from all this work, using just tiny strips of metal and people reporting sightings. If there is a better system, we have not found it yet.
We shouldn’t ever blindly trust any individual, but in this case, it’s something hardly any person that works with birds will deny the benefit to birds and mankind. The verification is there, and has been for a very long time now.
No, your perspective is how we get climate science denial and vaccine skepticism and removal of fluoride from drinking water.
People with no subject matter experience or practical knowledge of what “Science” actually is.
I said trust scientists. Not a scientist. Scientists. Plural. Trust the literature reviews and meta analyses of multiple studies. Trust the scientists that have amassed DECADES of knowledge of an incredibly small and specialized area of interest.
Instead, we get schmucks all up and down shitting on whatever study they want. The number of times I’ve seen papers dismissed simply on the population size alone for being “poor statistical power” without any discussion on effective and whether the study was actually appropriately powered or not.
I bet you don’t even really know what the drivers are for the reproducibility crisis and where real problems are.
Ad hominem. I am out.