Implications of improving survival estimates
Data on survival probability are crucial for demographic modeling (Carey, 1993). Our results show that HSV improved the estimates of survival probability in both species. Such improvement can increase the reliability of our predictions of population trends (Carey, 2001). Many scientists are interested in the effect of age on survival to investigate evolutionary theories related to senescence (Bonduriansky & Brassil, 2002; Sherratt et al., 2010; Sherratt, Hassall, Laird, Thompson, & Cordero-Rivera, 2011; Zajitschek, Zajitschek, & Bonduriansky, 2020). While this is theoretically feasible with CMR of wild population of insects, field studies based on the naked eye yield low-resolution data (low resighting rates) which prevents accurate predictions. In our study, we showed that HSV reduced the uncertainty around survival estimates across age and made the age-dependent survival pattern more detectable. Similarly, HSV improved our estimates of body size effects on survival probability. This is particularly important because body size has been the focus of many studies in evolutionary biology and ecology (LaBarbera, 1989; Blanckenhorn, 2000; Ozgul, Bateman, English, Coulson, & Clutton‐Brock, 2014).