Condor Watch Talk

September poster presentation

  • wreness by wreness moderator

    Posted for @Rick N.

    In the .pdf file of the September poster presentation, there is a section entitled: "Patterns we’re exploring". It then displays some type of figurative analysis that I haven't a clue about. Can anyone enlighten me about what I'm seeing there please?

    https://condorzoo.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/condor-poster-final.pdf

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  • vjbakker by vjbakker scientist

    Sorry for the delay. Two of the scientists who put the poster together will respond to this Rick!

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  • BirdGrrl by BirdGrrl scientist

    Hi Rick,
    Thanks for the question! The thing about poster presentations is that the scientist is usually there in person to explain the figures and so it’s best to leave off as much text as possible. But that clearly doesn’t work very well in this context!

    The funny starbursts in those figures are social network maps. Each condor that our volunteers have IDed is a circle. The color of the circle/condor indicates something about the status of the bird. In the top figure “Social relationships and cause of death” the color of the condor indicates whether it’s still alive, has died from lead poisoning (red) or has died from another cause (yellow). With this analysis we’re asking: How does who you hang out with influence your chances of staying alive or of dying of lead poisoning? These figures were made from super preliminary, not well-truthed data, so we really can’t draw any conclusions here. (Mostly what I mean is that we haven't verified the IDs of all these birds.) But we intend to repeat these analyses soon with cleaned up and verified data and we hope to find some interesting stuff. For example, you see that we have two main clusters of birds in the figures. Well, this is to be expected. These are our northern and southern California populations. We’re seeing that the birds in each of those populations associate pretty cleanly with each other. We might well find in the future that some birds float back and forth, but we haven’t seen this yet. We might also see a pattern where birds that have died of lead poisoning are located more to the periphery of the clusters than grey or yellow birds. This would indicate that being socially isolated, in this case, excluded from feeding at carcasses when other birds are present, would predispose birds towards lead contamination.

    On the second set of figures, the birds are colored according to the frequency with which they’ve suffered from lead poisoning. Here we see that even birds that are still alive (grey in the top figure) may still eat lead from time to time. Again, when we do this analysis on our cleaned up data where the IDs have been verified, we will be looking to see how social interaction relates to the rate with which birds get sick from lead. Of course, when we finally do the actual analyses, we’ll be doing more than just looking at these very attractive figures. The statistical programs that generate these figures also define levels of connectivity and allow us to do statistics to give some quantitative measure of social relatedness and the tendency for lead poisoning, etc.

    Hope that helps!
    Alex

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  • Rick_N. by Rick_N.

    That helps greatly! I didn't know what a social network map for condors looked like, but now I do!

    I venture that there is more lead poisoning in the left grouping (north California?) than in the right. The condors not in either group seem very poisoned.

    I need some more time to understand the second one... Thanks again.

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