Mike, Innocent until proven guilty for whom Frank or the aquarium trade?
I agree that the data needs more thorough analyses. But, Frank's methods appear OK to me and the sample size is very large. Consequently, I mentioned the results provided to me by Frank Lallo in my paper "Cyanide-Free Net-Caught Fish for the Marine Aquarium Trade. They steted that based on telephone interviews t hat the mortality at the retail level was on average 60% on the US east coast, 35% in the midwest, and 30% on the west coast. I accept this information as being true , until demonstrated otherwise by further analyses of Frank's data.
While everyone is entitled to speculate and have an opinion, I have not seen any other quantitative data provided to contradict what Frank Lallo has provided. On the contrary, I have interviewed many other individuals who have provided data to support the conclusions reached by Frank Lallo. Just because your pet store did not experience high mortality rates does not mean it did not occur. One store is hardly representative. Frank followed individual shipments and gathered data on at about 25 shipments per store for about 300 stores nationwide. I don't know of any other study with that amount of data.
Peter Rubec