July 23, 2014 — “The little girl did a science fair project based on my PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED DISCOVERY of lionfish living in low-salinity estuarine habitats. … [M]y years of groundbreaking work on estuarine lionfish are being completely and intentionally ignored.”
Thirteen-year-old Lauren Arrington has been busy on the media circuit these past few weeks, doing interview after interview about the sixth-grade science project that landed her in a published scientific paper.
Arrington’s experiment revealed that lionfish — the invasive, venomous species of fish thought to be native to saltwater oceans – could actually survive in nearly freshwater environments, which could potentially damage the marine ecology of estuaries, where salty ocean water and fresh river water mix.
The story went viral. Arrington’s work was featured in science magazines and local newspapers, and word of her “breakthrough” discovery made its way to major news organizations, including NPR, CBS and NBC.
But on Monday, a marine biologist by the name of Zack Jud made an explosive claim: All these stories were based on a “lie,” because Arrington was taking credit for research he’d published three years earlier.
“My name has been intentionally left out of the stories, replaced by the name of the 12-year-old daughter of my former supervisor’s best friend,” Jud wrote on Facebook. “The little girl did a science fair project based on my PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED DISCOVERY of lionfish living in low-salinity estuarine habitats. … [M]y years of groundbreaking work on estuarine lionfish are being completely and intentionally ignored.”
Read the full story from The Washington Post