Talk:9.6 year cycle of lynx abundance

This article was nominated for deletion on 30 January 2007. The result of the discussion was keep.

Discussion on merger with Canadian Lynx article

I think that this would be a mistake. This article is about a 9.6 year cycle that has been reported extensively in many animal populations and happens to be best known in the Lynx. The intent of the article is to give information about the state of knowledge of thet cycle rather than about the lynx. Ray Tomes 05:22, 19 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

On second thought, I agree with this. This cycle is as much of an interesting fact on the Snowshoe hare and Boreal forest as it is of the Canadian lynx. I do believe this article should be renamed. Boreal forest population cycle or Snowshoe hare–Candian lynx population cycle. —Ruud 16:34, 19 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well it is also observed in species unrelated to that habitat such as Atlantic salmon and weather variables. It would be reasonable to remove the later part of the name and simply make it 9.6 year cycle. Ray Tomes 20:52, 19 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. So when I speculated that the article was created for another purpose entirely than to describe the lynx population cycle, I might have been on to something after all? I still believe, as I indicated in that comment, that a merger would work best for these two articles at this time, as they are both so short. But I can also understand the inclination to keep them separate. Tim Shuba 04:49, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What other purpose? The purpose is to give some information about a cycle. There are a lot of other known cycles on which there is no information in wikipedia. Unfortunately articles are being deleted faster than they are being added and as someone noted in the list of cycles deletion discussion there is precious little information about cycles. One reason for this is that a small group of people are determined to delete anything that I do. They do not look at the facts. Ray Tomes 05:38, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, those cycles are completely unrelated (despite the coincidence that they have an average duration of c. 10 years) so it makes no sense to discuss them in the same article. —Ruud 06:52, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at the reference The Case for Cycles You will find that there is ample evidence there that groups of cycles with the same period are not as you claim unrelated. It has been found in all cases where many cycles in different things have the same period, they also have the same phase. This argues very strongly for a common cause, even though there is no generally accepted agreement on what that cause is. Therefore, in the interests of future scientists discovering the common causes it is important to mention these facts. Ray Tomes 21:50, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Request for Citations

The first 2 citations should be to the Wing article (first ref), the others to the Dewey one (2nd ref)listed at the end. Ray Tomes 12:16, 19 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In the AfD discussion for this article, user Addhoc was kind enough to provide this link to a lot of sources that mention this subject. In going through it, I could find no reference to Dewey whatsoever in any of the scholarly references (I wasn't looking for Wing, but didn't notice him either). Same goes for my search at scholar.google.com. Unless someone can point to solid scholarly references that cite Dewey in proportion to the mention of him in the article, I intend to remove information about Dewey's views from the article, as well as remove the citations as appropriate. Anything relevant to Dewey himself may be placed in the article that bears his name, of course, if it fits there. This is accordance with policy WP:Undue weight. There appear to be many recent journal papers and books written on the subject. Any thoughts on good recent peer-reviewed material will be welcome. Tim Shuba 04:19, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What Drives the 10-year Cycle of Snowshoe Hares? contradicts some of the statements currently in this article and provides a very extensive bibliography. A Spatial Analysis of Wildlife's Ten-Year Cycle might be a very useful reference as well. —Ruud 06:48, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]