Media 101 – How to jump a shark

@Andrew30 Actually, she appears to be something of a writer of fantasy stuff.

Forgive her for being a product of the uni’s.

I’m not sure this is all on the reporters. The Washington Post article by Juliet Eilperin http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/first-ever-hybrid-shark-discovered-off-australia/2012/01/03/gIQAPy00YP_story.html follows:
“Australian blacktips confine themselves to tropical waters, which end around Brisbane, while the hybrid sharks swam more than 1,000 miles south to cooler areas around Sydney. Simpfendorfer, who directs the university’s Centre of Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture, said this may suggest the hybrid species has an evolutionary advantage as the climate changes.”
It also seems that Prof. Colin Simpfendorfer emailed Eilprin “that he and his colleagues “don’t know what is causing these species to be mating together.” They are investigating factors including the two species’ close relationship, fishing pressure and climate change.”
I’m having a lot of problems with this because everything I’m finding says the supposedly tropical Australian blacktop has historically been found far south of Brisbane. This write up says Australian blacktips are found in Sydney some 750kms to the south of Brisbane. http://www.carnivoraforum.com/index.cgiboard=current&action=display&thread=13559#ixzz1iXq9gIi6
And this 2010 study http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1095-8649.2010.02770.x/abstract says the Australian blacktips are not restricted to tropical waters which means almost a complete overlap with the common blacktip.
So why would fishery researchers claim a shark was not found outside of tropical waters when it seems they most certainly are? And why did they feel the need to mention climate when the alee effect of fishing pressure was a far more plausible explaination?
Temperature cannot explain the interbreeding- whether or not the Australian blacktips are tropical. The only plausible explanation is the alee effect or this happens more than we think.
So why mention climate change at all?

Add it to the list. Right up there with “man-made global warming increases prostitution” (my personal favorite).

Apparently, shark morals aren’t they used to be.

Reminds me of this, from Wiki (sorry):
“Chinese whispers[1] is one name for a game played around the world, in which one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first. Some players also deliberately alter what is being said in order to guarantee a changed message by the end of it.
The game is often played by children as a party game or in the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread,[2] or, more generally, for the unreliability of human recollection.”
============
Also known as “telephone”: a condition sometimes cured by checking the source of information.
Skeptics have been known to check sources.

Mods, I thought that I had posted this but it looks to have gotten lost, a follow on post (Andrew30 January 4, 2012 at 7:06 pm) has alredy shown up.
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Dina Spector’s Experience
Reporter
Business Insider
Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Online Media industry
August 2010 – Present (1 year 6 months) New York,NY
Responsibilities include managing Business Insider’s fast-growing stable of outside contributors and syndication partners; working with online editors to curate and promote quality stories and features that MAXIMIZE SITE TRAFFIC; producing and editing content across website’s verticals
Production
Assistant Books By Design
August 2010 – August 2010 (1 month) Boston, MA
Copy edited, FACT CHECKED, proofread English and history textbooks in production; provided administrative support to project managers
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Source: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dinaspector
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It looks like she may have made the switch from fact checking to maximizing site traffic when she moved to the Privately Held Business Insider. With your addition of her ‘story’ and a link from the “The world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change” she clearly has met one of her performance objectives.
Anthony, I’m sure she will thank you later.

Life adapting to their environment? I thought that was a big PC no no these days.

Re that B.S. in Journalism, I wonder if Dina Spector misspelled “B.A.”? /snarc
Alternatively, I wonder, is spelling the science class in Journalism these days? /snarc
She should have gone to the University of Missouri, where Journalism rates higher than Basket Weaving. /snarc

This theme of cold water shark interbreeding with warm water shark is in every article US, Australia and elsewhere and is not limited to Dina Spector’s article. An example:
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/hybrid-sharks-found-in-australian-waters/story-e6frg12c-1226235321454Dr Jennifer Ovenden, of the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, said: “Hybridization could enable the sharks to adapt to environmental change as the smaller Australian black tip currently favours tropical waters in the north while the larger common black tip is more abundant in sub-tropical and temperate waters along the south-eastern Australian coastline.”
The above is a meaningless statement told to the reporters- the range overlaps so why dwell on a temperature gradient between the species? This range mapfrom the Queensland government shows a complete overlap of both shark species in their tropical waters. http://www.dpi.qld.gov.au/28_12085.htm
Where it really gets interesting is the DNA test used to discover these hybrids is new (2011)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-0998.2011.03023.x/abstract. And you cannot identify the hybrid without the DNA test.
And it really starts to go off the rails here:
http://news.discovery.com/animals/hybrid-shark-australia-climate-change-120103.html
“Colin Simpfendorfer, a partner in Morgan’s research from James Cook University, said initial studies suggested the hybrid species was relatively robust, with a number of generations discovered across 57 specimens.
So they found a number of generation – and lets assume 5 years for a generation (minimum) so we are going back at least several decades that we know of and possibly much longer– but it is this statement that really makes me scratch my head:
“The hybrids were extraordinarily abundant, accounting for up to 20 percent of black-tip populations in some areas, but Morgan said that didn’t appear to be at the expense of their single-breed parents, adding to the mystery.”
If some 20% of the population in some areas are these “hybrids” were they ever really different species or simply sub-populations? To reach 20% of the population for hybrids I’m assuming that the interbreeding has been occurring for a relatively long time.