Recovery of the black-footed ferret

After the black-footed ferret was reintroduced to the wild in the early 1990s, its population declined to only five individuals in 1997. Plague and canine distemper both occurred shortly after the initial release. Nonetheless, beginning in 2000 the ferret rapidly recovered, so that there were about 200 individuals in the Shirley Basin population in 2006.

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.”

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¹The black-footed ferret recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.