In: Biology
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the mark-recapture technique and what is the technique used for?
Mark-recapture is a method in ecology used to estimate sizes of population of animals where manually taking the count of individual animals is impractical. In this method, a number of animals are captured, and marked with an identifiable method, followed by releasing back them into the original population. Later, another sample of the population is captured and the number of marked individuals within that sample is counted. a population size is estimated from the number of marked and recaptured individuals.
Strengths: Mark recapture method can actually be applied to population where manual estimation is impractical; The method is precise and less biased; You can obtain rich data from this method
Weaknesses: If no organism is recaptured, you get undefined results; The marking used must not diminish over the time course of population size estimation; No immigration or emigration should be occuring at this time, it will have a high impact on the size measurements: Mortality events also affect this estimation adversely; Marking may some times be disadvantageous to the animals, by making them more visible to predators or making unappealing for mating.