Review of Alaskan Harbor Seal Stock Assessment by Kathy Frost

• Main Authors: Greg O’corry Crowe, Karen Martien, Barbara L. Taylor
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Major Point; harbor seal
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.495.3370; http://alaskafisheries.noaa.gov/protectedresources/seals/harbor/cie/rtofrost.pdf

Major point #1: Exclusion of so many samples and resulting gaps in analysis make results unimplementable The reviewer argues that the exclusion of 228 of the sequenced samples from our final analyses, and the resulting geographic gaps in the results, render the results of the study ‘unimplementable ’ in a management context. We disagree with this assessment. From a scientific viewpoint, the exclusion of these samples is not only justifiable, but is required in order to avoid producing results that are biased and potentially misleading. As we explain in Appendix 3 of the reviewed document, if the sample size from an area is small relative to the haplotypic diversity of the area, as is the case for the initial units we excluded from our analyses, then any frequency-based measure of genetic differentiation between that area and another will be negatively biased. In other words, the two areas will appear to be more genetically similar to each other than they actually are. If we had included such poorly sampled areas in our analyses, they would have tended to cluster together early in each of the three clustering analyses, suggesting that they are more genetically similar to each other than to better sampled strata. This result