Water vole statement in response to negative press coverage

Water vole statement

On Monday the 21st of March, The Independent newspaper ran an article based on work by Dr. Tom Moorhouse and Professor David Macdonald1 with the headline "Scientists investigating demise of the water vole are to blame for its decline". This headline, and the first paragraph of the article, wrongly blamed conservationists for the decline of the water vole. The report upon which the article was based contained nothing that could support The Independent's headline. As stated in a correction published by The Independent on 24th March, the decline of water voles in the UK has resulted from habitat loss and predation by American mink, and not from the actions of conservation biologists monitoring wild populations.

In the light of this, and other inaccurate publicity arising from media coverage of a Journal of Applied Ecology press release, we take the opportunity here to offer a clarification of our work.

The report itself detailed an association between an observed reduction in the number of females being born into a population of water voles and the radio-collaring of that population. The report suggests that radio-collaring of water voles may have resulted in the skewed sex ratios observed, but emphasises that it cannot prove a causal effect and that more work would be required to establish or refute such a link. Although summary-point 5 of the manuscript implies a causal link, this is an error: as we conclude in the main body of the text: "….further work is needed to establish a causal link between collaring water voles and skew in offspring sex ratios."

It is currently unknown whether radio-collaring of populations of water voles results in a skew in sex ratios. We continue to work on this issue, and the data of colleagues may well also shed light on it. Although this has been misunderstood in the press, which we greatly regret, our purpose was to suggest an hypothesis - like all hypotheses, it is no more than that - something to be tested, refined, refuted as data accumulate. It would be premature to treat it as more substantial, and certainly it is no basis for policy decisions at this stage. We believe we were right, however, to draw other researchers' attention to our evidence for this possibility. That does not negate the demonstrable fact that the benefits of the detailed information which radio-tracking and other forms of monitoring provide are immense. They have made possible nationwide strategies for water vole conservation and the implementation of re-introduction programmes for this species. Even if the hypothesis that sex ratio variation and radio-collaring is eventually shown to be causal for water voles under some circumstances, it strikes us as unlikely that this would outweigh the great benefits of radio-tracking to both conservation and science for this species. It would, however, be a consideration to which researchers should be alert; and alerting researchers was indeed the purpose of our original report. The Independent's damaging and incorrect headline unfairly flagged conservation research as contributing to the decline of the water vole. The reality is that such research - much of it based heavily on radio-tracking - is the lynch-pin upon which the conservation of the species is founded.


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