D.M. Heisey 2012 One can joke that 'exciting statistics' is an oxymoron, but it is neither a joke nor an exaggeration to say that these are exciting times to be involved in statistical ecology. As Halstead <i>et al.</i>'s (2012) paper nicely exemplifies, recently developed Bayesian analyses can now be used to extract insights from data using techniques that would have been unavailable to the ecological researcher just a decade ago. Some object to this, implying that the subjective priors of the Bayesian approach is the pathway to perdition (e.g. Lele & Dennis, 2009). It is reasonable to ask whether these new approaches are really giving us anything that we could not obtain with traditional tried-and-true frequentist approaches. I believe the answer is a clear yes. application/pdf 10.1111/j.1469-1795.2012.00532.x en The Zoological Society of London Bayesian shared frailty models for regional inference about wildlife survival article