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Thylacine survival odds are 1 in 1.6 trillion


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I'm hoping for that 1! :yes:

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23 minutes ago, Summerin1905 said:

you never know that one percent might come true.

I can't even begin to do the calculations to express 1 in 16,000,000,000 as a percentage, but it's not one. 

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I haven't read this study, but I've seen (and failed to understand the maths involved) the pre-print. I have no idea how they came to that figure. 

Although, I do agree roughly on the date, but I got there by reading the historical accounts. I assumed the last or penultimate generation would have been the youngsters detected in 1937/38. So likely they pegged it in around 1950 latest. Sorry to blind you all with such hard core science. 

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3 hours ago, oldrover said:

I can't even begin to do the calculations to express 1 in 16,000,000,000 as a percentage, but it's not one. 

You're missing the last three noughts but I agree. It wouldn't be one. :)

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7 minutes ago, Stiff said:

You're missing the last three noughts but I agree. It wouldn't be one. :)

Yeah, I ran out. That's a lot of noughts. 

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2 hours ago, Mr.United_Nations said:

Imagine if a bet was placed on those odds

Ýeah, it'd be a very tiny win for the bookies. 

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NOOOOOOOOOO!  Say it isn't so. . .we can rebuild them. . .make them faster, stronger, better. . .It's time to clone them. . .I want my army of mutant Tasmanian Tiger beasts.  

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What awesome animals. I hope they're wrong.

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I'm losing hope on these.    A few years ago I thought there might be a fighters chance that some of these are still surviving.

Now I don't think so.   With everyone having cameras on them, trail cams and less inhabited space, each passing year is like 20 years was before.  

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They will not be found where they are not...

I hope that advise helps to reduce the odds... :whistle:

 

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1 hour ago, Myles said:

I'm losing hope on these.    A few years ago I thought there might be a fighters chance that some of these are still surviving.

Now I don't think so.   With everyone having cameras on them, trail cams and less inhabited space, each passing year is like 20 years was before.  

Me too, but not now. 

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  • 1 month later...

Never!! :cry:

Hope.jpg.767271591c7938d6a524a6d18730c654.jpg

 

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So the chance isn't zero.....

If I was making a bet on this, I'd go ahead and hire a animal geneticist to create me a thylacine from known DNA samples. Even if it cost a billion dollars,  you'd win trillions of dollars on the bet.

Edited by DieChecker
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Most statistics are made up on the spot. There is no way to compute those odds.

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As I've said I've no idea about the maths used to calculate this, but the broad results seem right from what I've read. 

It's not as if the tiger's decline isn't really well documented, much more so than people realise. 

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The article does say that the 1 in 1.6 trillion is on the Generous side of their model. I'd guess that they have some sort of escalation where ever year with no sighting means another order of magnitude.

The wild Singing Dogs of New Guinea were only recently discovered to not be extinct in the wild, after 50 some years of no reports. I wonder what the odds of that happening were? 1 in 100 million? One in 10 million?

Sometimes the unlikely happens.

 

Edited by DieChecker
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2 hours ago, Artaxerxes said:

Most statistics are made up on the spot. There is no way to compute those odds.

'Real' statistics are not often made up on the spot.

Your post is either sarcasm or inaccuracy at its finest!

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23 minutes ago, DieChecker said:

The wild Singing Dogs of New Guinea were only recently discovered to not be extinct in the wild, after 50 some years of no reports. I wonder what the odds of that happening were? 1 in 100 million? One in 10 million?

Not the case, they weren't missing for fifty years, weren't considered extinct in the wild. Some articles may have spun it that way, and hyped the significance of the recent photo though.

 

31 minutes ago, DieChecker said:

The article does say that the 1 in 1.6 trillion is on the Generous side of their model. I'd guess that they have some sort of escalation where ever year with no sighting means another order of magnitude.

I haven't read the full paper just the pre-print (and forgotten that) but I'd imagine that the key information used would have been the numbers from 1909 until '33 when the mainstream narrative says that the last known capture took place, although in fact it almost certainly happened around 1930. 

People tend not to focus on that twenty or so year period, but it's there that you get fairly detailed information on the population's collapse. Extinction happened in localised pockets from East to West, the Central Highlands which were their prime area had dried up by the late twenties, with the last pockets being on the West Coast last reliably noted in 1938. As I say though people ignore that. 

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17 minutes ago, Timonthy said:

'Real' statistics are not often made up on the spot.

Your post is either sarcasm or inaccuracy at its finest!

In all fairness there's room for a lot of subjectivity to creep into the figures in this case. 

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My impression of New Guinea is that it's rugged, extensively forested, and sparsely populated by people who don't all read Scientific American or correspond with Nature. In other words, there's not a lot of data about whether Thylacines are or are not present.

There are some hearsay reports that they are, so I'm going to go with New Guinea as the most likely survival site. This is not so much because it's likely, as because it's less unlikely than their surviving in more thoroughly explored places is.

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12 hours ago, oldrover said:

In all fairness there's room for a lot of subjectivity to creep into the figures in this case. 

Yes of course, but all it takes is a bunch of low probability estimates compounded. 

Personally I think it's pretty definite they're gone, so 1 in 1.6 trillion is infinitely higher than my estimate! It is sad :mellow:

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