A COMMENTARY ON CURRENT APPROACHES IN THE AQUATIC SCIENCES

This paper reviews some of the current practices in limnology and ocea nography and discusses ways to improve our habits in these fields. A s urvey of all 253 articles published in the journal Limnology and Ocean ography in 1980, 1985, and 1990 indicates that the majority of papers (>60%) were predominantly descriptive, only about 30% used an experime ntal approach. Of the 27% articles presenting models, only 3% validate d these models using field data. Only one out of 253 papers presented biological criteria to reject hypotheses. We discuss the significance of descriptive studies in the fields of limnology and oceanography, th e use of numerical techniques to detect spatio-temporal patterns in th e data, the significance of reductionism in aquatic sciences, the intr oduction of ad hoc hypotheses, the problem of selecting study sites, s tations, and sample locations in shore and pelagic studies, and strate gies available when an experimental approach cannot be used because en vironmental factors cannot be controlled.