J Rasmussen wrote:I attempting to work some data on long-lived fish that were stocked from a hatchery into a lake system. We have 11 years of data, and are fairly confident that we are capturing the majority of fish during the annual spwaning run. However, only 2% of the fish have ever been recaptured
. Needless to say, none of the GOF tests function with such few recaptures. Is there another test that will allow me to calculate GOF even with such few numbers, or does anyone have any suggested reading that may help me out? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
J Rasmussen
With that few recaptures, GOF testing is the least of your problems. One of my wise colleagues says that if your recapture probability is <0.10, then there is little you'll ever be able to do (except maybe go home and pull the blankets up over your head). The 'big law' in this game is do whatever you can to increase p. If you can't, you might simply have to accept you can't do much. I had a colleague working on seabirds once who complained bitterly that even though he had put on >15000 tags on chicks, he'd recaptured only 30-40 or so over 15 years. he wasn't pleased when I told him that he would not be able to estimate juvenile survival rate with those data. Hopefully, you're not in the same situation, but it sounds as if you might be. The general recommendation is, rather than spend $$$ tagging all the fish, spend some of that $$$ on increasing encounter rates. Better to have fewer marked individuals, and higher p, than the other way around.
by J Rasmussen » Tue Oct 18, 2005 3:49 pm 