[Babase] Matured BY dates for females

Catherine Markham amarkham at princeton.edu
Sun Aug 27 15:12:27 EDT 2006


Hi all,

I wanted to document that I finished the last pass of reviewing matured 
by dates for females with Jeanne this afternoon.  The first step in this 
process was to determine all females in BIOGRAPH that had no matured 
date (matured = {}).  From this list, we focused on females older than 3 
years so as to exclude young females that were extremely unlikely to 
have reached sexual maturity.

The following broad patterns emerged for females that were justifiably 
had no matured dates:

1.  Females who appear on sexskin scoring datasheets but remain flat and 
“B” up until their death dates.
2.  Females who die before appearing on sexskin scoring datasheets.

For both scenarios above, NO maturity dates were entered into Babase. 
These females died before reaching puberty.

All other females were investigated on a case by case basis.  For most, 
the earliest date indicating sexual maturity was 178 days (average 
gestation) prior to the birth of their first documented offspring.

Details for all entered/changed matured BY dates are documented in the 
Babase change log.  All additions/corrections have been made to the 
database (since we're still using the FoxPro system as the "working" 
version of Babase, I added matured dates to BIOGRAPH.matured and coded 
all BY dates with an "E" in BIOGRAPH.mstatus).

As a final query, Jeanne and I also checked for females who had matured 
ON dates already entered in the database but the particular date fell 
during a time of spotty monitoring for a study group.  We referred to 
the datasheets and, in most cases, decided to enter the matured ON date 
as a matured BY date.  Again, details are documented in the Babase 
change log.

Thanks and let me know if anyone has questions/follow-up,
Catherine


More information about the Babase mailing list