: How are animal populations counted? Like how do you know how many owls there are on Earth?
In: Biology
One method, is to capture and tag part of a population, and then release them back into the population. The next season you capture part of the population again, and based on the percentage of the second capture that was previously tagged and then re-captured in the second capture session, you can mathematically estimate the total population.
Known as the recapture method of population estimation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture?wprov=sfla1
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