What Are the Chances??

[hawker]

I check every Monarch I see for a tag...just wondering what are the chances of me every finding one?
Would it be like winning the lottery or are the odds a bit better? Fun, none the less.

[Mona Miller]

It depends how much you are in the flyway and how many people who are tagging those butterflies flying your way.

Keep looking! I always check, but I have never found any.

[Paul Cherubini]

Roughly 1 in 20,000

[Mona Miller]

Is your cat giving you data again?

[dandjtaylor]

HAHAHAHA...LOL

[Paul Cherubini]

Just basic grammar school math:

Eastern Monarch migratory population: roughly 1,000,000,000
Number of monarchs tagged: roughly 50,000
Ratio of untagged to tagged monarchs: roughly 20,000 to 1

Even if these figures are quite a bit off, the odds of encountering
a tagged monarchs would still calculate out be in the 1000's per 1.

[Mona Miller]

I think you cat has problems with her math:

Hundred - 100
Thousand - 1,000
Million - 1,000,000
Billion - 1,000,000,000

I'd believe one million, but not one billion.

[Paul Cherubini]

I think you cat has problems with her math:
I'd believe one million, but not one billion.

Dr. Lincoln Brower says: "After some extrapolation, the scientist now believes that the number of migrant monarchs in Mexico each year may be closer to a staggering half a billion." http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0 ... _geo2.html

And that's just the proportion of eastern monarchs that successfully completes the journey to Mexico.

[Mona Miller]

2002 data. The numbers have gone down since then.

A billion is 1000 million.