[Babase] Maturedates
Susan Alberts
alberts at duke.edu
Thu Apr 1 11:19:00 EDT 2010
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I went through the documentation and checked all uses of the term
>> "maturedates" to make sure that the rules for males are sensible. It
>> looks good to me. I found two items that I have comments on.
>>
>> 1. "The age of the individual on his Consorted date must be at least
>> 5
>>
>> years and less than 12 years."
>>
>> SCA comment: I am not sure why we restricted this to 12 years. Surely
>>
>> it's right that it would be a truly weird male that had not reached
>> firsst consortship by age 12, but I am not sure why we made it a
>> rule.
>>
>> There need be no upper limit. Was it just to flag possible errors? If
>>
>> so could we make it a warning rather than a rule?
>
> We can. I don't know why we made it a rule. Either there was
> no data and we figured we'd worry about changing it if we needed
> to or there was some bad data that we caught and figured we'd leave
> the rule in place until it caused a problem.
>
> We'll do whatever you decide.
Let's make it just a warning.
>
>>
>>
>> 2. "Males (or those of unknown sex) may have juvenile (Stype=J)
>> SAMPLES rows for up to but not including 1 year after maturity
>> (MATUREDATES.Matured)."
>>
>>
>> SCA comment: I am not sure we should have this rule. At this point we
>>
>> don’t sample subadult males (males that are past maturedate but not
>> yet reached rankdate) but if we did, the format for those samples
>> would almost certainly be just like juv point samples.
>
> That's why the rule is there, because you sometimes continue to
> sample as juv samples. IIRC there actually _was_ some data
> that was rejected by the conversion until we raised the limit
> to 1 year after the maturity date. (Although this may
> have been females.)
>
>> Then we would
>> have a problem with this rule. However, if we substituted "rankdates.
>>
>> Ranked" for "maturedates.matured" in this rule I would be more
>> comfortable. Comments?
>
> I thought rankdate came after maturity date so that would allow
> juvenile point samples for even longer than the current rule.
> Are you sure this is what you want?
Males reach "maturedates" long before they reach adulthood (which
comes at rankdate). In this way they are different from females, who
reach adulthood upon reaching maturedates. For males, the rule should
be different from females. We should allow them to be sampled as
juveniles well after they reach maturedates, in fact even after they
reach rankdates.
Does this clarify?
Susan
>
>
> Karl <kop at meme.com>
> Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
> -- Robert A. Heinlein
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Babase mailing list
> Babase at www.eco.princeton.edu
> http://www.eco.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/babase
------------------------------------------------------------
Susan Alberts, Dept of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, Durham NC
27708. Phone 919-660-7272, FAX 919-660-7293
More information about the Babase
mailing list