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   on-lain ✔ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ (lain@lain.com)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jul-2024 14:21:49 JST on-lain ✔ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ
   i heard this on a podcast and didn't check it, but here's the story:
   
   when the exxon-valdez oil spill happened, lots of birds got oil on them and died, and the guvmint tried to figure out how many birds died so they'd know how much to fine exxon. but they didn't know how get a count of the dead birds, because they could only count the dead ones that washed ashore, not the ones that stayed in the sea. so they took a hundred normal birds, dunked them in oil, threw them out at sea and counted how many of those washed ashore so they could establish the multiplication factor.
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     Zettour (zettour@gearlandia.haus)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jul-2024 15:10:46 JST Zettour

     in reply to
     @lain Appears to be a combination of information about 2 studies. First with 47 birds was stopped because of angry public, so I think those were killed rather than finding prekilled birds. 100 bird test later used recovered carcasses. The studies ended up being relatively worthless so they did a better one for sea lions but using artificial floaters instead of carcasses.
     on-lain ✔ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ likes this.