This article presents a personal account of the important contribution a publication from David Noakes’ lab (Pot, Noakes, Ferguson and Coker 1984, Quantitative sampling of fishes in a simple system: failure of conventional methods. Hydrobiologia 114:249–254) made to freshwater fish science in general and to the successful public defence of a doctoral thesis in particular. Pot et al. (1984) tested the accuracy of two conventional sampling approaches in their estimation of numbers of fish in a small pond (capture-mark-recapture and total sampling, following rotenone treatment). Their results demonstrated that even in a small and relatively uniform freshwater system (a pond of 0.1 ha), the so-called total sampling approach failed to provide the true number of any species of fish in the pond. The outcome of the study provided the evidence to debunk the assumption that absolute numbers of fishes can be obtained using rotenone treatment. This article therefore allowed me to defend my doctoral dissertation in the face of critical comments from a principal jury member, and firm proponent of ‘absolute sampling’, and it provided fish biologists with justification to focus on the development and application of sampling approaches, such as relative densities, which do not require futile attempts to obtain total fish numbers.

本文介绍了 David Noakes 实验室的出版物（Pot、Noakes、Ferguson 和 Coker 1984，在简单系统中对鱼类进行定量采样：传统方法的失败。Hydrobiology 114:249-254）对淡水鱼科学，尤其是博士论文的成功公开答辩。锅等人。(1984) 测试了两种常规抽样方法在估计小池塘中鱼的数量时的准确性（捕获-标记-重新捕获和总抽样，鱼藤酮处理后）。他们的结果表明，即使在一个小型且相对均匀的淡水系统（一个 0.1 公顷的池塘）中，所谓的总采样方法也无法提供池塘中任何鱼类的真实数量。该研究的结果提供了证据来驳斥使用鱼藤酮处理可以获得鱼类绝对数量的假设。因此，这篇文章让我在面对主要陪审团成员的批评意见和“绝对抽样”的坚定支持者时为我的博士论文辩护，它为鱼类生物学家提供了专注于抽样方法的开发和应用的理由，例如作为相对密度，不需要徒劳地尝试获得总鱼数。