Quote Originally Posted by Freakie_frog View Post
Just for the uneducated please fill us in on the difference in a a mulit degree biologist, who both worked as zookeepers, field biologists, researchers, and graduate students. During that time they were obsessive collectors and keepers of snakes, as well as of other reptiles and amphibians, and both individuals maintained excessively large private collections of animals. Each of these avid herpetologists has accumulated in excess of 10,000 snake-years of experience. (One “snake-year” of experience equals the full-time maintenance of one snake for a period of one year.) and a scientist.



P.S Just in case you didn't know Herpetologist are Biologist that specialize in the study of reptiles. so unless you've seen Dave or Tracy's "Minor" for all of their many degrees I'd hold off saying what they are and aren't just yet.
A quote from a herpetologist I somewhat know.

"Dave has an M.S. in Biology, but he is far from the academic that many of you guys are trying to anoint him as being. Dave chose a different path after his M.S.: herpetocultural. Of course he has published a handful of scientific papers since then, but if you knew anything about these papers, they often had many coauthors that did the science portion of the paper. Dave often just provided the field work: tissue samples, specimens, locale records for biogeographic analysis etc. That is not to say that these are not critical aspects of the study, as the study could not have been done without them, but that hardly qualifies Dave as having rigorously applying the scientific method to a problem, cranking out data, analyzing it, and drawing valid conclusions from it...that's where most of those coauthors came in. I was at UTA when much of this was being done.

...

There is a big difference between having lots of experience through gathering a bunch of observations and being able to apply the various techniques of ecology and population biology, through experimentation, to the issue of invasiveness. However, that is precisely what Dave and Tracy have done with their python paper. Have you ever wondered why it was published through the Chicago Herp Bulletin? It would never have been accepted in any of the academic journals...not because it was wrong or because academics have an agenda, but because it had zero science in it! It was a rant based off of their experiences that are almost entirely untested and therefore any potential biases cannot be sorted out of their publication. I'm afraid that many of you that have read their numerous articles on python and other snake husbandry are not being able to separate this kind of work from scientific papers."

Later, Matt