To count an animal population if you can't catch them all: capture some, mark them, release, and capture again. The ratio of new vs already seen tells you something about the total number. Shown here is iterated mark-and-recapture with a Bayesian updates to belief about pop size
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Assumption made here: the animals move around enough between measurements that you can treat each capture event as a random selection from the population, independent of the previous capture
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I believe they use exactly this reasoning for tiger census, except using camera traps that are moved around


