Equation 2 · Evolutionary Biology and Ecology in Practice: An Advanced Technical Guide
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The naive population estimate — mark animals, recapture a sample of later, count how many are marked, and scale up — assumes every individual in the population has the same probability of being caught in every session. That assumption is false in essentially every real population: some individuals are trap-shy, some trap-happy, capture probability drifts with weather and observer effort, and animals die or emigrate between sessions. Treating the naive ratio as ground truth silently launders all of that heterogeneity into the population estimate.
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