Rapid population growth of black-footed ferrets in Shirley Basin, Wyoming, since 2000. Releases of captive-born animals ended in 1994, and abundance was so low by 1997 that monitoring was intermittent during 1998–2002 (no data for 1998–99 or 2002)...The predicted abundance is exponential growth fitted to the minimum number alive (r = 0.47). (From Grenier et al., Science 317:779; 2007.)Captive breeding began in 1987 with only seven founding individuals. All of the current animals are descendants of that tiny initial set of founders. In the words of Martin Grenier and his co-authors put it in a study published today in Science, success in the wild has “largely obviated fears that inbreeding depression or captive propagation would impair population establishment or short-term persistence.” Or as Mike Lockhart1 was quoted in the Los Angeles Times story: “We shouldn't be giving up on things too early.”
1The black-footed ferret recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
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