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Survival of the most variable
As more and more species become highly endangered due to human activity, there has been a growing push to understand how to best reintroduce or relocate individuals from wild or captive populations. Suggestions ranged from choosing individuals from the most environmentally similar regions to choosing those who might have the best ability to adapt to new environments. Scott et al. used long-term data collected from translocations of Mojave Desert turtles, including animals once kept as pets, to test these questions. Although the overall survival rates of all turtles at the site (reintroduced and native) were extremely low, the transferred individuals with the greatest heterozygosity survived at much higher rates than those considered similar to the target population.
Science, this issue p. 1086
Abstract
Human-made environmental changes put up to 1 million species at risk of extinction. One management measure to reduce the risk of extinction is the translocation of individuals to places from which they have disappeared or to new places where biologists hypothesize that they have a good chance of survival. To maximize this probability of survival, it is common practice to move animals from the closest possible populations that contain likely related individuals. In an empirical test of this conventional wisdom, we analyzed a genomic dataset for 166 translocated desert turtles (Gopherus agassizii) who survived or died for a period of two decades. We used genomic data to infer the geographic origin of translocated turtles and found that individual heterozygosity predicted turtle survival, unlike translocation distance or geographic unit of origin. Our results suggest a relatively simple indicator of the probability of survival of a transferred individual: heterozygosity.
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