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Survival of the most variable
As more and more species become highly threatened due to human activity, there has been a growing push to understand how best to reintroduce or relocate individuals from wild or captive populations. Suggestions ranged from choosing individuals from the most environmentally similar regions to choosing those who may have the best ability to adapt to new environments. Scott et al. used long-term data collected during Mojave Desert turtle translocations, including animals previously kept as pets, to test these questions. Although the overall survival rates for all turtles at the site (both reintroduced and native) were extremely low, the translocated individuals with the highest heterozygosity survived at rates much higher than those determined to be similar to the target population.
Science, this number p. 1086
Abstract
Human-induced environmental modification is putting up to 1 million species at risk of extinction. One management action to reduce the risk of extinction is the relocation of individuals to places they have disappeared from or to new places where biologists speculate that they have a good chance of surviving. To maximize this probability of survival, standard practice is to move animals from the closest possible populations that contain presumably related individuals. In an empirical test of this conventional wisdom, we analyzed a genomic dataset for 166 relocated desert turtles (Gopherus agassizii) who survived or died over a period of two decades. We used genomic data to infer the geographic origin of the translocated turtles and found that individual heterozygosity predicted the turtle’s survival, while translocation distance or geographic unit of origin did not. Our results suggest a relatively simple indicator of the probability of survival of a translocated individual: heterozygosity.
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