Wednesday, December 10, 2014

12/10/14

Tonight's homework is the following:

1. prepare for tomorrow's check-in by looking over this week's notes.
2. complete Assignment 34A's practice questions (see below).
3. obtain data based on your plan so that you can estimate SoF's population in class tomorrow.

Practice Data Analysis

1. Suppose that you capture 10 individuals of a rare species of brook trout from an impounded watershed. You place a very small radio activated tag in the body cavity of each individual and then release these fish. You come back a month later and capture 20 fish and find that four of these are individuals that you had previously captured and released. What is your best estimate of the population size, N?


2. Over the period of a month, you trap and tag 8 red foxes, with uniquely colored tags, in the Watchmacallit Forest in New Jersey. You set up motion sensitive remote cameras up at various locations in the forest. A month later, you collect all the cameras and review the images. You record the results and note that the cameras took pictures of 3 tagged red foxes and 5 red foxes without tags. What would be the total population of red foxes in the area?

Remember that you can approximate the size of the population using the following equation:

            N = ( M x C )           N = Estimated size of total population
                        R                  M = Total # of animals captured and marked on 1st sampling
                                             C = Total # of animals captured on the 2nd sample
                                             R = # of animals captured on the 1st sampling that were recaptured on the 2nd sampling

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