Martínez María, Rodríguez-Vigal Carlos, Jones Owen R, Coulson Tim, San Miguel Alfonso
E.T.S. Ingenieros de Montes, Ciudad Universitaria s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
Biol Lett. 2005 Sep 22;1(3):353-6. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2005.0330.
Much insight can be derived from records of shot animals. Most researchers using such data assume that their data represents a random sample of a particular demographic class. However, hunters typically select a non-random subset of the population and hunting is, therefore, not a random process. Here, with red deer (Cervus elaphus) hunting data from a ranch in Toledo, Spain, we demonstrate that data collection methods have a significant influence upon the apparent relationship between age and weight. We argue that a failure to correct for such methodological bias may have significant consequences for the interpretation of analyses involving weight or correlated traits such as breeding success, and urge researchers to explore methods to identify and correct for such bias in their data.
从被射杀动物的记录中可以获得很多见解。大多数使用此类数据的研究人员假定他们的数据代表了特定人口统计学类别的随机样本。然而，猎人通常会选择种群中的一个非随机子集，因此狩猎并非一个随机过程。在此，利用来自西班牙托莱多一个牧场的马鹿（Cervus elaphus）狩猎数据，我们证明数据收集方法对年龄与体重之间的明显关系有重大影响。我们认为，未能纠正这种方法上的偏差可能会对涉及体重或相关性状（如繁殖成功率）的分析解释产生重大影响，并敦促研究人员探索方法来识别并纠正其数据中的此类偏差。
