I'm Just Jealous
The paper we read for discussion this week was frustrating because it was so annoyingly obvious. Environmental DNA concentrations are higher when an organism is actually present or is more abundant? It seems like common sense. Yet as I sit here analyzing my frustration, I realize that this is a potential flaw in the system. In scientific literature, we are taught to cite our sources and prove that what we are saying has been validated by the scientific community. Even though the idea of “sampling during the season when an organism is present” is common sense, how do you cite that if a study has not been previously conducted? Is it even necessary to site something so obvious? What happens if you don’t cite it and then a reviewer asks you why you made the decision to sample the way you did? I like to think that the authors of this paper had the same thoughts and decided to err on the side of caution and conduct this study to give a reference for the greater scientific community to use. In fact, in designing our class project we were operating under the assumption that since alewife at our study site are anadromous, they would either be present in very low concentrations or absent all together in our study lake because they have not migrated back in for the season. Thanks to De Souza et al., 2016, we now have a citation to use to justify this train of thought.