About 3300 individual butterflies were caught in Malaya by naturalist Corbet trapping butterflies. They were classified to about 500 species.
data(corbet)A data frame with 24 observations on the following 2 variables.
speciesNumber of species.
ofreqObserved frequency of individual butterflies of that species.
In the early 1940s Corbet spent two years trapping butterflies in Malaya. Of interest was the total number of species. Some species were so rare (e.g., 118 species had only one specimen) that it was thought likely that there were many unknown species.
Actually, 119 species had over 24 observed frequencies, so this could/should be appended to the data set. Hence there are 620 species in total in a sample size of \(n=9031\) individuals.
Fisher, R. A., Corbet, A. S. and Williams, C. B. (1943). The Relation Between the Number of Species and the Number of Individuals in a Random Sample of an Animal Population. Journal of Animal Ecology, 12, 42--58.