Genetic rescue of Florida panthers reduced homozygosity but did not swamp ancestral genotypes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
) occupy a vast geographical range spanning from Canada to Argentina. Due to urbanization and unregulated hunting, pumas in Florida, known as panthers, are the only breeding population east of the Mississippi River. In the 1990s, Florida panthers numbered <30 individuals suffering from inbreeding depression. In 1995, eight pumas from Texas were translocated into southern Florida to mitigate the effects of isolation. This translocation reduced inbreeding depression and increased population size. While genetic rescue is often suggested as a means of ameliorating the effects of small population size, the underlying genetic mechanism and its long-term efficacy remain understudied. We sequenced the genomes of posttranslocation Florida panthers (PTFPs) to elucidate the genomic consequences of genetic rescue. We inferred local ancestry across the genomes of PTFPs and found that no regions have been entirely replaced by Texas ancestry, discarding the possibility of genetic swamping. Furthermore, the beneficial effects of the translocation were likely caused by a reduction in homozygosity, alleviating recessive deleterious load, rather than by a reduction in the number of deleterious variants. We did not find evidence that selection has favored replacement of original Florida DNA with Texas DNA in any systematic fashion. Using simulations, we found that heterozygosity increased in the long-term compared to a no translocation scenario; however, the effects on fitness are more transient. Our findings hold significant implications not only for the management of Florida's panther population, but also for informing strategies for genetic rescue in other wild, inbred populations encompassing broader conservation efforts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".