blow to galway bay salmon farm

[agardiner22]

http://www.nosalmonfarmsatsea.com/archives/811
delighted by this news

[weedave]

its about time someone more experienced and with a bit of unbiased knowledge has finally came out proved them wrong.

i agree this is great news - i am glad they have used the term "completely discredited"
its a bit polite though

thanks for sharing that link.

dave

[Divisadero]

Yes the Times went ahead and published that press release. Trawl through the scientific literature and selectively quote and you can find something to justify any position/argument even if you stick to peer reviewed journals. But the Marine Institute seem to have really dredged the bottom of the barrel this time.

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[hurler01]

Yes the Times went ahead and published that press release. Trawl through the scientific literature and selectively quote and you can find something to justify any position/argument even if you stick to peer reviewed journals. But the Marine Institute seem to have really dredged the bottom of the barrel this time.

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Makes you wonder if hypothetically speaking a research project is undertaken with the methodology set to link the data to an already assumed conclusion or set of findings.

[Divisadero]

Let's put it this way if a company hires a scientist or a scientific team to undertake a survey for whatever reason you can be pretty sure he knows what findings are expected of him. I'm not saying that all science is bogus. Far from it. It's just that it is too easy to manipulate the findings in many cases. The salmon farm/sea lice debate is a good example. If no original studies are being conducted (and that takes time) you have to rely on trawling through the literature for work already completed. In most cases you can cherry pick the studies that suit your argument. If you were honest you would look at all the relevant literature and than come to your conclusions. You would also only rely on peer reviewed journals.

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[Caz-Galway]

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environm ... -1.1498055

[Bradan]

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/marine-agency-rejects-critique-of-sea-lice-data-1.1498055

That's a very badly written article, possibly deliberately so to muddy the waters.
It confuses an article published in Agricultural Sciences, which was previously panned by FIE (to be honest the article was so bad it wasn't hard to pan it), with articles published by the same author in the Journal of Fish Diseases, which are the subject of the paper just published and which completely discredits their findings. The Marine Institute came out in defence of the Ag Sci article recently, however this time they simply made a statement that they are aware of the new paper, will consider it and possibly respond through the peer-review process. The headline is very misleading, and suggests that the Marine Institute are defending Jackson's papers in J. Fish Diseases.

For background, these papers are used by BIM as the basis for their argument to expand salmon farming in Ireland - the papers claim a very low mortality rate in wild salmon attributable to sea lice from salmon farms. BIM have consistently used this research to back their claims, and claimed that this research is definitive, and trumps any other research which comes to other findings. However, this research has now been totally discredited - basic mathematical errors in processing data mean that the 1% mortality rate that Jackson claims is actually more like 34%. To have your work discredited so publicly, and through the same peer-reviewed journal that originally published it, would be regarded as highly embarrassing for any scientist. The reputation, and credibility, of the Marine Institute itself is now under serious question. I have friends in the MI who are very embarrassed by the work being published by their colleague, and by the stance taken by the MI in backing him.

By the way, the Ag Sci article that is also referred to contains no data on sea lice, and if you read it, you will see that they cannot reach the conclusions they do based on the data (or lack of) that is presented in the article. Their two main conclusions are that salmon stocks are healthier in rivers with better water quality (no s*** Sherlock?), and that salmon stocks are healthier on the west coast (where salmon farms are) than on the east coast. Well, since the west coast is where about 80% of our salmon rivers are, and only some of them are close to salmon farms, that's pretty f*cking intuitive as well. The Ag Sci journal also has an impact factor of 0.19 - about as low as you can get in terms of how important/influential the journal is. I asked a friend in academia who publishes regularly in peer-reviewed literature, and he was adamant that he would never publish in a journal with such a low impact factor - its meaningless.

[Bradan]

http://www.fisheriesireland.ie/Press-re ... -lice.html