The data bootstrap we introduce here provides a method to evaluate whether theoretical variance estimates are valid when the individuals are considered statistically independent, or whether variance inflation procedures are required to account for dependence among (say) siblings.
Non-independence of fates among marked individuals is a fairly big deal, and probably more general than we'd like to think (in a perfect world, all study organisms would be blind, semi-sentient with no memory, and would wander around our study area such that the action of each individual is in no way influenced by actions of other individuals. In other words, our study organisms should be Brownian particles. I don't know where this perfect world is, but a lot of statistical models assume we visit there with some frequency).
More details to come, but a fairly complete introduction is found in Appendix G of the MARK book:
http://www.phidot.org/software/mark/doc ... /app_7.pdf