Resumo

Species in comparative demography studies often have a common phylogenetic or evolutionary ancestryand hence, they cannot fully be treated as independent samples in the statistical analysis. Although theserious implication of ignoring phylogeny has long been recognized, no attempt has been made so farto account for the lack of statistical independence due to phylogeny in multi-species mark–recapturecomparative demography studies. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian hierarchical model that explicitlyaccounts for phylogenetic dependence among species, and to correct for imperfect detection, which is acommon phenomenon in free-ranging species. We illustrate the method using individual mark–recapturedata collected from 16 seabird species of the order Procellariiformes. Data on body mass and phylogenyof these species are compiled from literature. We investigate the relationship between adult survivaland body mass with and without accounting for phylogeny. If we ignore phylogeny, we obtain a posi-tive survival–body mass relationship. However, this relationship is no longer statistically significant oncephylogenetic dependence is taken into account, implying that survival may actually depend on an unmea-sured variable that is correlated with body mass due to a shared dependence on phylogeny. The proposedmodel allows the integration of multi-species mark–recapture data and phylogenetic information, andit is therefore a valuable tool in ecological and evolutionary biology.

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