>> "Let's put the "oral" and the "contact" doses on different scatter
>> diagrams. We can assume that they are mostly going to be "chronic" 
>> and "sublethal" attempts, so they should all at least be below the 
>> acute LD50 levels (except for the Alex Lu study from Harvard!)"

> I thought we were just going for a dose response curve not a 
> determination whether or not neonics are to blame for something.  
> Or did I miss something?

I'm sorry - what I was trying to say was that most of the data was going to
fall into the "sublethal" range, as this has been where the work has been
done.  I've not seen much attention given to the acute LD50 threshold, so I
assumed that, at minimum, there would be no papers where doses higher than
the EPA acute LD50 were given.  The Alex Lu paper was an exception, in that
a clearly fatal dose was given to bees, which would make it an outlier on
the scatter diagram.

None of this is going to settle any issues of "blame" for neonics.  What it
will do is establish credibility for the work as a whole, or make clear that
the work is not credible.  If we get a nice, tight pattern (think .410 or
20-gauge shotgun at 10 yards), then the work is at least self-consistent,
and worth data-mining for patterns.  If we get a random spread, then we can
at least see if similar claims are being made about "adjacent" or "nearby"
data points on the dose / exposure scattergram.

If bees are being affected with methodology, rather than the toxins under
study, we will be unable to make a pattern.
If bees are being affected with toxins, then the pattern should jump off the
page at us.

I will set up a public Google Doc spreadsheet, which works like Excel, kinda
sorta, and a data-entry form.  Monday.  Speaking Sat and Sun.


	 

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