Lynx, Lies and Media Hype

WDFW biologist Tom McCall submitted three samples of bobcat fur as a blind control, getting permission from both his supervisor and the office manager. In addition, McCall informed the Fish and Wildlife Service's Tim McCraken, survey leader for the Wenatchee. McCraken, who later sent in a blind sample himself, expressed his support.

Meanwhile, John Weaver of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the nation's most experienced lynx researcher and the inventor of the rubbing pads, was questioning the DNA analysis himself. Weaver had been hired by the Forest Service and the states of Oregon and Washington to design and direct an earlier lynx survey, in 1998--the survey that found lynx all through the Cascades. To check the accuracy of the lab, located in New York, he resubmitted eight of the samples to a lab in British Columbia. They all came back as lynx, but the B.C. lab said something wasn't right about the signal strength and that the samples seemed to come from one animal. Weaver suspected that DNA from lynx hair had gotten into a solution and contaminated the samples at the New York lab. So he pulled some original hair still left on the pads and sent it to the B.C. lab. This time it came back as cougar and bobcat. The contamination theory was correct. Bernatowicz, McCall, McCraken, and the other state and federal biologists had been right.

Another biologist who sent in a blind sample--Mitch Wainwright of the Forest Service--told me this: "At the time nobody knew that the problem at the [New York] lab was contamination rather than method. If we'd known, I wouldn't have submitted the blind samples, and I don't think the others would have either." As it turned out, their samples went to a different lab--the University of Montana's, in Missoula. But even if this were relevant--and it's not because one lab is generally no better or worse than another--at least some of the biologists thought their samples were going to the New York lab Weaver had used. As it also turned out, the Missoula lab had used blind samples when it was setting up the survey's protocol. But no one at the lab had bothered to tell the field biologists.

The Missoula lab was having trouble reading lynx DNA--so much, in fact, that the problem became a topic of discussion at a meeting of biologists in Portland on July 11, 2000. Still, Scott Mills, who runs the lab, has been expressing outrage to the press. "What the biologists did was wrong," he keeps saying. I asked him why, reminding him that they had gotten permission from their supervisors. "Well, their supervisors weren't in charge of the study," Mills answered. "Kevin McKelvey and I were in charge."

True, but maybe that's not the point. Andy Stahl, director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) and a forest scientist himself, offers this allegory: "An elderly professor and some grad students are conducting a spotted-owl survey, but one of the students suspects the professor's hearing is defective. At midnight she climbs Ridge 2 and plays a tape of a barred owl. Next day she reads this in the field notes: 'Spotted owl, Ridge 2, midnight.' 'Hey, Prof,' she says, 'that wasn't a spotted owl-it was me playing a barred-owl tape. I think you're losing your hearing.' There are two ways for the professor to react. The right way--the scientific way--is, 'Way to go, gal. You saved the survey. Thanks!' The other way--Mills's way--is, 'How dare you question my competency as a scientist? You're fired!'"

To find out if Stahl has it right, I interviewed four of the nation's most respected wildlife scientists. Ken Goddard, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service's forensics lab in Ashland, Oregon, said this: "There is nothing wrong with running blind samples past a lab." I asked if he'd be offended if he got one without a heads-up. "No," he answered, explaining that he regularly gets blind samples and sometimes finds out only after the fact. "I don't want my people getting complacent. Our job is to get the right answers, to look only at the evidence and not take an emotional stance. I'd like to believe that all labs take this attitude; and, of course, that's a naive belief."

"Submitting blind samples is part of doing rigorous science," said the Wildlife Conservation Society's John Weaver.

Elliot Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute and a founding life member of the Society for Conservation Biology, said, "These scientists did what researchers routinely do when submitting samples to analytical laboratories."

"It shouldn't be an issue at all," said Richard Reading, director of conservation biology at the Denver Zoological Foundation and co-chair of the advisory team for Colorado's lynx restoration program. "They should have a right to verify the lab results. I think it makes all the sense in the world."

Another astonishing aspect of the story is the way the agencies cringed, groveled, and cheerfully sacrificed the biologists' careers. Interior Secretary Gale Norton, professing to be "deeply troubled," unleashed the Inspector General and apparently had her people refer the case to the Justice Department, which declined to prosecute. But the only Interior employee known to have engaged in biofraud is Norton herself. Last October, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) learned that, in a report ordered by the U.S. Senate, she had deleted data gathered by Interior's own biologists on the dangers of oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and plugged in numbers provided by the oil industry.