Experimental Tests of Captive Breeding for Endangered Species

Abstract

Abstract: Several captive breeding regimes were compared for their ability to maintain fitness ( larval viability) and genetic variation in small populations of the housefly ( Musca domestica L.). Populations were either maintained at constant sizes of 40, 200, or 2000 individuals or initiated with two pairs of flies and allowed to grow to 40 individuals ( low‐founder‐number populations). Low‐founder‐number populations without migration exhibited low larval viability (22%) after 24 generations, compared to larger populations maintained at either 200 (49%) or 2000 (69%) individuals, and suffered high extinction, with only 44% of the lines surviving 24 generations. Low‐founder‐number populations subjected to two additional founder ( bottleneck) episodes, reducing them to two pairs of flies, suffered little additional loss in fitness or extinction compared to the single‐founder treatments. Migration as low as one individual per generation (2.5% migration) significantly offset both reduced fitness and rate of extinction. Conversely, fitness was not significantly increased for low‐founder‐number populations when founders were selected from the top performing 20% of pairs under full‐sib mating. Populations maintained at 40 individuals were not sustainable, exhibiting low larval viability (35%) and a high extinction rate (40%) over 24 generations, similar to the extinction rates for populations initiated with only four founders. Although none of the populations maintained at 200 individuals went extinct, their fitness was reduced by 20% compared to a large control population maintained at 2000 individuals. Electrophoretic variation was significantly correlated with fitness across treatments, but the correlation of fitness to narrow‐sense heritability of two morphometric traits was not significant.