CLASSICAL CLOSED-POPULATION MODELS 25
with capture record 100111, was captured on nights 1, 4, 5, and 6, but not
on nights 2 and 3. Similar interpretations apply to other capture histories.
In larger studies with numerous capture occasions and many captured
individuals, the capture-history matrix becomes very large, and with the
classical models it is more convenient to represent the raw data by a tally
of the frequencies of each capture history, which retains most of the in-
formation in the original capture-history matrix.
For many classical estimation procedures, the following summary sta-
tistics are sufficient for the statistical analysis:
k=the number of capture occasions;
n
j=the number of animals captured on the jth capture occasion,
j=1,..., k;
u
j=the number of unmarked animals captured on the jth capture
occasion,j=1, ..., k;
m
j=the number of marked animals captured on the jth capture
occasion,j=1,..., k, where m
1=0;
M
j=the number of distinct animals captured before the jth capture
occasion,j=1, . . . , k, where this is the same as the number of
marked animals in the population just before the jth capture
occasion, and of necessity M
1=0 and M
k+1is defined as
the total number of distinct animals captured in the experi-
ment; and
f
j=the number of animals captured exactly jtimes,j=1,..., k.
These statistics are given in table 2.2 for the data in table 2.1. The sta-
tisticn
jdenotes the column sum for the jth column (occasion) in the cap-
ture history matrix, with (n
1,n
2, ..., n
6)=(15, 20, 16, 19, 25, 25). Out
of the n
janimals, there are u
jfirst captures and m
jrecaptures, so that
u
j+m
j=n
j, with (u
1,u
2,..., u
6)=(15, 8, 6, 3, 3, 3), and (m
1,m
2,...,
m
6)=(0, 12, 10, 16, 22, 22). The statistic M
jcan also be interpreted as
the cumulative number of first-captures on the first j−1 occasions, thus
M
j=u
1+u
2+⋅⋅⋅+u
j−1and (M
1,M
2,..., M
7)=(0, 15, 23, 29, 32, 35,
38). That is, the number of marked individuals in the population pro-
gressively increased from M
1=0 to M
7=38.
The row sum for each individual denotes the capture frequency of that
animal, and (f
1,f
2,..., f
k) represent the frequency counts of all cap-
tured animals. As shown in table 2.2, the frequency counts for the
mouse data are (f
1
,f
2
,..., f
6
)=(9, 6, 7, 6, 6, 4). That is, 9 animals were
captured once, 6 animals captured twice, . . . and 4 animals captured on
all 6 occasions. The term f
0is the number of animals never captured,
so that f
1+f
2+⋅⋅⋅+f
k=M
k+1andf
0+f
1+⋅⋅⋅+f
k=N. Therefore,
estimating the population size Nis equivalent to estimating the number
of missing animals, f
0.