Saturday, June 7, 2008

Apologies to Dr. C (no relation to Sr. C)

I had a very talented professor who I consistently disapointed for my entire stay in college. One of the many excellent bits of advice she passed on was "Keep your textbooks. Keep your notebooks. You never know." Well. She was right, as always.

I was trying to figure out the mathematics of the weeds we're pulling- factoring in the whole basal rosette stage, and the number of seeds, and the germination rate to find the expected time to population reduction- and luckily I had another talented professor (in plant ecology) who was obsessed with this stuff. I pulled out my books and notes this weekend and found that we would have to kill something like 99.95% of the weeds every year for twelve years to stop the spread. Then, with the seed bank depleted, we could relax our vigilence slightly, if more seeds were not constantly coming in on hay trucks. That's only another 500 acres to go over with a fine-toothed comb.

My poor quasi-supervisor thinks that killing 75-90% will make progress against the invasion- I thought she was just better informed that I was, but in fact she is just wrong, wrong wrong. What I am doing is pointless to the extreme, which is unfortunate, but I feel somewhat mollified for four reasons.
1.) When I thought "some weed work" would be chopping down sattelite populations when we ran accross them and eradicating tiny pockets of the hot new invasives, science was on my side. I just assumed that the planning and research was better than it was. Ho, ho, easy mistake to make!
2.) My desire to use herbicide does not mean I'm lazy. It means I want to be effective.
3.) I know I'm a better botanist than my minion. I know my training in plant taxonomy is better than the rigid understanding of my actual supervisor. But I thought my quasi-supervisor was a better botanist than me in every respect. Now that I know this is not true, I like her a lot better. I have ego issues.
4.) Damn, I was smart to not take Plant Ecology from the usual professor. Thanks, Dr. C! Thanks, empathetic affirmation of my choice from Cuervito! Also, nyah nyah nyah nyah.

Okay, off to find eggs.

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