[Babase] regarding Alex; susan & amboseli team please read

Jeanne Altmann babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Mon, 12 Jul 2004 12:05:11 -0400


Alex has recently come to our attention (both with hormone analyses and in 
BABASE conversions) with respect to his date of testes enlargement.  Daphne 
and I have been looking at the original data and at BABASE, and we see 
there is also a potential problem with his estimated age and date of birth:

Jan 94: an adult male and 'sub II' male, shy, are in the notes starting 18 
Jan.  The sub II male (how were the field team using this label?young 
subadult? old subadult?) was described as "Mlozi size, E".  During the 
month, notes are there about the males being seen or not.  Note: Mlozi was 
born in Sep 87.

Feb 94:  New males Felix and Alex were named and start appearing on the 
censuses the beginning of Feb.  A post-it note on the sheet in the lab 
notes that they only start on the censuses and being entered in the 
computer as starting in Feb but they were probably there in Jan.

In BABASE, Alex gets an estimated birthdate (birth status 2) of 3 Feb 
87.  My guess is that this was done primarily on the basis of the 'Mlozi 
size' comment, but perhaps Susan knows where we should look for age 
estimates from that time.  However, if we really went by the Mlozi 
comparison, we would use Sep 87, which is more consistent with maturation 
information (below).

Maturation (testes enlargement):  Alex is not on the maturation sheets for 
several months (forgotten or really E as noted previously?) and then 
suddenly appears there in June94 as not E, gets checked each month until 
called E in October (but notes on his furry rear end and shyness making it 
difficult to check him).  In babase, his mstatus is listed as E (estimated) 
also, but we know this is a problematic field.

Thus it seems to be that he may have been given a birth date that's earlier 
than justified and a matdate that's later than justified.  Together, these 
lead to his estimated mat age being 7.5 years!!!  The range of known mat 
ages is 3.3yrs (in Lodge) - 6.6yrs (wild-feeding), putting his estimate 
essentially a year later (and beyond the range we said was possible in 
BABASE).  Thoughts????

thanks,
jeanne