Want to make a difference?

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Want to make a difference?

Postby Buford Pruitt » Feb 15, 2007 2:07 pm

When I was an active cave diver, I used to count the critters I saw during my dives - fishes, amphibians, troglobitic crustaceans, snails, you name it, if it was alive, alive-o, I counted it. Oh, I neglected to make counts on my first dives because I was then in a learning mode and sometimes it was all I could do just to stay alive myself. And there might be a dive or two in there when I didn’t make any counts at all because, well, they didn’t really qualify as Abe Davis dives, if you know what I mean, but I have a lot of numbers in an Excel file that I have been sitting on over these last two decades.

Now it turns out that these numbers have value in documenting Florida’s cave biota for the purpose of establishing baseline information to be used in groundwater and cave management. For example, if no cave crayfish have ever been reported from a given cave, it is difficult to make a case for establishing a motive for protecting the water quality in that cave. Yep. You read me right. Get this: The Suwannee River Water Management District Governing Board is claiming that, because no one ever reported cave crayfish in Manatee Spring Cave, such organisms must NEVER have existed there, and therefore there is no good reason to protect the water quality for fish and wildlife sustenance in that cave now! Unbelievable! This is the kind of leadership we currently have in some high places.

Annette Long is fighting that good fight through her position as President of Save Our Suwannee, but she needs some help. She needs that data of mine reduced into a useful report. Better yet, she needs that data published in the scientific literature, or even the gray literature.

Unfortunately, I am so swamped with my 2008 NSS Convention duties and my work on other speleo-jobs, plus life itself, that I simply cannot take the time out now to work the data up into a useful format. HELP!

What is needed is someone familiar with Excel to take my rather large spreadsheet and figure out how to best tabulate and summarize it for conservation ends. This person or persons should be familiar with Excel and hopefully also familiar with Lotus 1-2-3. I created the original spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3 and then imported it into Excel, and the translation wasn’t perfect. This person should also have a scientific background and a desire to publish. Lastly, this person must have the time to do this work, and very soon.

I can promise that you won’t receive one thin dime for this work, that you will wind up with at least one publishable scientific paper, and that you will make a positive difference in the conservation of Florida’s immense but diminishing cave resources. Of course, I will want to co-author all papers that derive from my database, but if you can lead the way then you will be the primary author.

Please contact me, Buford Pruitt, ASAP at bpruitt5@cox.net or 352-271-3203.
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Postby bigalpha » Feb 15, 2007 2:52 pm

email sent your way.
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Postby Buford Pruitt » Feb 15, 2007 7:28 pm

Based on the responses that I have received so far, it appears that I may not have explained what exactly is needed from a volunteer. Please allow me to try again.

On each cave dive I undertook, I counted the number of individuals of each species that I encountered. For example, on one particular dive into, say Peacock Spring Cave, I might have counted 4 yellow bullheads, 1 brown bullhead, 9 pallid cave crayfish, 1 Hobbs cave amphipod and 14 cave isopods. I would write down these taxa and their counts while decompressing after exiting the cave. I did this on nearly all of my 400+ cave dives.

Each spreadsheet row might be a single cave dive. Each spreadsheet column would represent attributes of the dives, such as dive location, dive date, and taxa counts. I compiled this data into a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet file, and some years later when I changed over to Excel it converted the data to the Excel format. The data is still there, the problem being that conversion stripped away headers. Hopefully, there are no other problems, but if there are some hidden, anyone working with the spreadsheet needs to have enough familiarity with Excel to be able to fix it. I believe this is a minor problem.

There may be sufficient data to document general population trends in some caves, but most of the caves were not sampled periodically and some only a few times. There is certainly sufficient data to document which taxa were present in the caves on those dates. There may also be sufficient data to perform analyses that were invented after I graduated from college in 1970, but because I have not really kept up with developments in quantitative analysis of biological populations since 1970, I cannot address that issue. What we need is a biologist with some available time to work my data into a format and report that can be used by scientists to try to force the state’s land development permitting agencies to protect our aquifer. As it is now, those regulators are claiming that there is insufficient evidence to justify protecting our ground waters.

In addition to the Manatee Spring example I previously discussed, the District’s board chairman claimed that dye tracing is “voodoo science,” and therefore refused to use a dye tracing study conducted by cave divers Pete Butt and Tom Morris that proved to everybody else in the world that Mill Creek Sink (which the NSS owns) is directly connected to Hornsby Spring. This was during their considerations over whether to permit land spreading of human and dairy wastes directly above the Cathedral-Falmouth Cave System.

Perhaps only 10 to 15 biospeleologists have published cave biota surveys in Florida, and only a few of those have published comprehensive Florida cave biota species lists. For example, H. H. Hobbs, Jr. did his doctoral dissertation on the crayfishes of Florida in 1942, in which he discussed cave species correlated with his collection sites. Another example is the series of papers published over the years by Richard “Dick” Franz focusing on the biogeography of Florida’s cave crayfishes. A third example would be my own listing of all the fishes known to have been found within Florida’s caves, published in 1994. In my opinion, the most important paper was Franz’s “Review of Biologically Significant Caves and their Faunas in Florida and Southern Georgia.” I know of no other Big Picture reports of Florida cave biota.

Hobbs and Franz were not cave divers. They obtained their specimens from cave pools, sinkholes and springs, or from cave divers like Judy Bauer, Tom Morris and me. Obviously, Hobbs and Franz’s lists of what species occur in which caves are necessarily limited by their collection methods. My cave diving species counts, on the other hand, are quite large, with the total numbers of my counts possibly exceeding nearly all other published records of troglobitic crustaceans and fishes combined. It has become imperative that this data be processed and published, and I simply cannot do that at present.
Buford Pruitt
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Postby Buford Pruitt » Feb 16, 2007 4:34 pm

I have received several replies already, including two from qualified young biologists here in my home twon who want to help. Thanks to everyone who responded. I knew I was coming to the right place! :woohoo:
Buford Pruitt
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Location: Gainesville, FL USA
  


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