[Babase] Maturedates

Susan Alberts alberts at duke.edu
Wed Mar 31 16:10:44 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?


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. 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?



Thanks for drawing our attention to this,



Susan





------------------------------------------------------------
Susan Alberts, Dept of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, Durham NC  
27708. Phone 919-660-7272, FAX 919-660-7293






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