ArticleEcology and evolution2015
Limited catching bias in a wild population of birds with near-complete census information.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Heritability and age-dependent changes in genetic variation of telomere length in a wild house sparrow population.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Not so social in old age: demography as one driver of decreasing sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Individual quality and phenology mediate the effect of radioactive contamination on body temperature in Chernobyl barn swallows.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Selection on individuals of introduced species starts before the actual introduction.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
- Article
- Male age and its association with reproductive traits in captive and wild house sparrows.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Estimating mortality rates among passerines caught for ringing with mist nets using data from previously ringed birds.Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Heritability and social brood effects on personality in juvenile and adult life-history stages in a wild passerine.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2018Article
- Opposite-sex associations are linked with annual fitness, but sociality is stable over lifetime.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animal research often relies on catching wild animals; however, individuals may have different trappability, and this can generate bias. We studied bias in mist netting, the main method for catching wild birds. The unusually high resighting rate in our study population-house sparrows (Passer domesticus) on Lundy Island (England)-allowed us to obtain accurate estimates of the population size. This unique situation enabled us to test for catching bias in mist netting using deviations from the expected Poisson distribution. There was no evidence that a fraction of the birds in the population consistently remained uncaught. However, we detected a different bias: More birds than expected were captured only once within a year. This bias probably resulted from a mixture of fieldworkers sometimes ignoring rapid recaptures and birds becoming net shy after their first capture. We had sufficient statistical power with the available data to detect a substantial uncaught fraction. Therefore, our data are probably unbiased toward catching specific individuals from our population. Our analyses demonstrate that intensively monitored natural insular populations, in which population size can be estimated precisely, provide the potential to address important unanswered questions without concerns about a fraction of the population remaining uncaught. Our approach can help researchers to test for catching bias in closely monitored wild populations for which reliable estimates of population size and dispersal are available.
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