Disorders of Nondomestic Mammals

Rideout, Bruce A.

doi:10.1002/9781119949053.ch7

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…In conservation management, early viability selection often goes unstudied, as studbooks predominately contain only animals that can be uniquely identified. Many species management programmes do investigate early embryo losses to determine whether they can be attributed to infectious or toxic causes (Rideout ), and document lost eggs or juveniles that fail to wean to monitor breeding success rates (Ballou et al . ), but whether the distribution of genotypes of lost embryos differs from survivors is rarely tested.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of early viability selection on management of inbreeding and genetic diversity in conservation

et al. 2015

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Maintaining genetic diversity is a crucial goal of intensive management of threatened species, particularly for those populations that act as sources for translocation or re‐introduction programmes. Most captive genetic management is based on pedigrees and a neutral theory of inheritance, an assumption that may be violated by selective forces operating in captivity. Here, we explore the conservation consequences of early viability selection: differential offspring survival that occurs prior to management or research observations, such as embryo deaths in utero. If early viability selection produces genotypic deviations from Mendelian predictions, it may undermine management strategies intended to minimize inbreeding and maintain genetic diversity. We use empirical examples to demonstrate that straightforward approaches, such as comparing litter sizes of inbred vs. noninbred breeding pairs, can be used to test whether early viability selection likely impacts estimates of inbreeding depression. We also show that comparing multilocus genotype data to pedigree predictions can reveal whether early viability selection drives systematic biases in genetic diversity, patterns that would not be detected using pedigree‐based statistics alone. More sophisticated analysis combining genomewide molecular data with pedigree information will enable conservation scientists to test whether early viability selection drives deviations from neutrality across wide stretches of the genome, revealing whether this form of selection biases the pedigree‐based statistics and inference upon which intensive management is based.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%