New biograph maturity date columns Was: Re: [Babase] CADET

Susan Alberts babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Thu, 7 Oct 2004 06:26:59 +0300


I may be behind things so forgive me and correct me if I've forgotten 
something we already did or have misunderstood.

My understanding was that the rankdate and maturedate in the new 
tables would exist only for animals for whom we actually know the 
date they matured or became ranked.

There is a large set of males for whom these dates are missing 
because, when we first met them (when they first immigrated into 
study groups) they were already adult. Hence, they have no maturedate 
or rankdate (the markers of subadulthood and adulthood, respectively, 
for males) even if they have already achieved one or both of these 
markers.

One things that we often need to ask babase is "find all the adult 
males in group x on this date". As it is currently constructed, this 
is very difficult to do because there is no marker of adulthood 
encoded in babase except matdate and rankdate, which are missing for 
many males.  "Mature by" and "Ranked by" dates would provide this.

For males for whom we already have matured dates and ranked dates, 
these columns would be redundant. However, this is a relatively small 
fraction of all the males in the database.  I envisionsed using the 
rankdate and maturedate when analyzing/asking questions about the age 
at which these events happened, and using "ranked by and matured by" 
to differentiate adult and subadult from juvenile males for any 
particular time period.

Susan

>>The other thing that I think we need to add for males is "ranked 
>>by" and "matured by" (and perhaps dispersed by, although the first 
>>two are by far the most important) columns or a new table. This is 
>>because when a male enters the study population already as an adult 
>>he never gets a matured or ranked date, creating the contradictory 
>>situation that a male who appears to have never matured is 
>>functioning as an adult male. This has been a constant source of 
>>confusion that we've had to work around.
>
>How would the new "ranked by" and "matured by" be different from
>the current rankdate and maturedate?
>
>Karl <kop@meme.com>
>Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
>                  -- Robert A. Heinlein
>_______________________________________________
>Babase mailing list
>Babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
>http://www.eco.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/babase


-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Susan Alberts, Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, 
Durham NC 27708
919-660-7272 (phone), 919-660-7293 (FAX)