Skip to content

Estimating a pond population by tag and recapture

Question

You catch 5050 fish from a pond, tag them and let them go. Next day you catch 4040 fish and find 1010 carrying tags. What is the natural estimate of how many fish live in the pond?

Short answer

200200. A quarter of the second sample is tagged, so the 5050 tagged fish should be about a quarter of the population (Lincoln–Petersen estimate 50×4010\tfrac{50\times40}{10}).

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

See the hint and the full worked solution in the question bank (free account).

Open the worked solution