On Sep 5, 9:24 pm, wrote:

And even allowing that the fish with the DNA they wanted to restore were
markedly different from the fish they actually used, thus making a
complete mess of things, how do they know that the DNA from the fish
they used to determine which fish DNA they wanted to preserve was not
simply another of a myriad of different DNA in fish that all looked
alike?

I wonder about this as well. The original paper talks about the
historical range of the greenback, back as far as 150 years. If the
greenback and the Colorado River strain are so alike that today's
fishery biologists cannot visually tell them apart, how do we know
that those identifying the range of the greenback 150 years ago could
tell. They certainly weren't extracting DNA from adipose fin clips!

Hm. Unfortunately the discussion of the historical range is cited
from another article by Young and Harig. I don't think I'm going to
read the whole literature, but it looks like those who have studied
the problem have extrapolated potential historical habitat for
greenback, not actual populations. Fair enough.

Bill