Question

You are studying wolverine (gulo gulo) populations. in the population you are observing, there are 166 females each of which you are tracking using radio collars. you observe 5 females at a single site. how many possible combinations of 5 females are there in this population of wolverines?

Answer 1

Answer: There are 988,455,798 different groups of 5 wolverine.

This is a combination problem. We are trying to determine how many different groups of 5 can be formed out of a set of 166 objects.

The standard notation for this is:  166 C 5

This means we select 5 from a total of 166, where the order doesn't matter. Most calculators will do this for you.

To work it out manually evaluate:  166!/(5! x 161!)