Abstract
The ‘Alalā (Corvus hawaiiensis), or the Hawaiian crow, was historically only found on the island of Hawai‘i, declined greatly in the twentieth century, and was last seen in the wild in 2002. A captive breeding program was initiated in the 1970s and 113 individuals were in captivity in 2014. All of the present day individuals are descended from nine founders. From pedigree analysis, 50 % of the initial ancestry was from a single founder pair and as of 2014, 45 % of the ancestry was still from this pair. Six other founders have also contributed substantially to the population and managed breeding has increased and evened out their contributions in recent years. Managed breeding has also kept the inbreeding level at the relatively low level of 0.120 in 2014. However, for most of the history of the population, all of the inbreeding was from the single founder pair and in 2014, 76 % of the inbreeding was still from this pair. As a result, the high inbreeding depression previously seen in this population appears to descend from this single pair. Breeding management to maximize founder genome equivalents, which takes into account loss of variation from genetic drift, could increase the genetic representation from the founders, particularly if ancestry from the single founder with only one living descendant is increased.
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Acknowledgments
PWH was partially supported by the Ullman Professorship. Funding was provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Hawai‘i Division of Forestry and Wildlife, Moore Family Foundation, Marisla Foundation, several anonymous donors, and the San Diego Zoo Global. PWH thanks Bob Lacy for his assistance in calculating individual inbreeding coefficients. Thank you to Rich Fredrickson for assistance with some of the figures. Many thanks to the staff and interns at the captive breeding facilities on Maui (Maui Bird Conservation Center) and Hawai‘i (Keauhou Bird Conservation Center) and particularly to Marla Kuhn, Tracey Goltz, and Lisa Komarczyk for their efforts. We appreciate comments by Fern Duvall on early captive breeding and Jolene Sutton and several anonymous reviewers on the manuscript.
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Hedrick, P.W., Hoeck, P.E.A., Fleischer, R.C. et al. The influence of captive breeding management on founder representation and inbreeding in the ‘Alalā, the Hawaiian crow. Conserv Genet 17, 369–378 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-015-0788-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-015-0788-z