The university’s reef claims are found to be incorrect
Do you remember the shocking scientific study about how baby fish in our polluted oceans now actually prefer eating plastic microbeads to their natural diet? It was reported everywhere from the Times and the Washington Post to the BBC and, very likely, the ABC too. Our media, as we know, just loves a nice, juicy, ‘it’s all our fault and we are not worthy to live on this fragile earth’ environmental disaster story.
What you’re much less likely to have come across, though, is the subsequent correction. That original 2016 story wasn’t just bunk, it was positively fraudulent. The paper — by a Swedish team led by Dr Oona Lönnstedt of Uppsala University — was found to be so riddled with errors that it was officially retracted. Lönnstedt herself was found by a university disciplinary committee to have ‘fabricated the results.’
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But the scandal didn’t end there: it has just got bigger — and moved closer to home, with the exposure of a number of similarly dubious studies, published by the prestigious Coral Reef Centre at James Cook University (JCU).
The investigating team of seven scientists that has exposed the alleged misconduct is the same one that rumbled Lönnstedt’s dodgy ‘baby fish prefer plastic junk food’ paper. Led by Timothy Clark, an aquatic physiologist from Victoria’s Deakin University, they examined eight JCU studies on the effect of climate change on coral reef fish — one of them authored by Lönnstedt — and found 100 per cent replication failure. That is, none of the findings of the original eight studies was found to be correct.
BBC.COM
