Augmenting small and isolated populations with immigrants from elsewhere is a potentially powerful, yet controversial management tool. The goal of this approach was to increase population sizes via demographic and/or genetic rescue, but augmentation can also have the unintended consequence of breaking down local adaptation and reducing population fitness through outbreeding depression. In theor...

Congenital malformations of the central nervous system have long attracted the interest of statisticians and epidemiologists. Various features of the data, frequently conflicting, have been emphasised. Hewitt (1965) found that the mortality of spina bifida decreased markedly from east to west on the North American continent and suggested the hypothesis that " . .. both the downward time-trend o...

Self-referent phenotype matching, the ability of animals to use aspects of their own phenotype as a referent in discrimination decisions, is believed to play a significant role in nepotistic interactions and mate choice in a wide range of taxa [1]. An individual’s ability to assess the similarity between its own phenotype and that of the individuals it encounters can provide a reliable measure ...

Introduction events can lead to admixture between genetically differentiated populations and bottlenecks in population size. These processes can alter the adaptive potential of invasive species by shaping genetic variation, but more importantly, they can also directly affect mean population fitness either increasing it or decreasing it. Which outcome is observed depends on the structure of the ...

Numerous factors influence fitness of free-ranging animals, yet often these are uncharacterized. We integrated GPS habitat use data and genetic profiling to determine their influence on fitness proxies (mass, length, and body condition) in a threatened population of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) in Alberta, Canada. We detected distinct genetic and habitat use (ecotype) clusters, with individual ...