The effort to save North American wild bison may have inadvertently created a new, unseen threat to their survival
Evidence is mounting that wild North American bison are gradually shedding their genetic diversity across many of the isolated herds overseen by the U.S. government, weakening future resilience against disease and climate events in the shadow of human encroachment.
The study is awaiting peer review by other scientists. It does not include Yellowstone National Park's herd of some 5,000 unfenced bison, the largest federal conservation herd that's seen by millions of people who visit the park annually. Bison squeezed through a perilously small genetic bottleneck in the late 1800s with the hunting and extermination of the massive animals that had numbered in the tens of millions. At one point, fewer than a 1,000 survived.
The new analysis suggests the problem, left unchecked, would likely spell doom for small herds wandering the immense Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, the hemmed-in bison at the Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Oklahoma that descended from a group of six animals, and a tiny educational display herd at Sullys Hill National Game Preserve in North Dakota.
Frozen bison embryos and in vitro fertilization hold out promise for easing genetic isolation among herds without the risks of transferring hulking mammals or spreading diseases such as brucellosis that leads to aborted calves, said Gregg Adams, a professor of veterinary biomedical sciences at the University of Saskatchewan who has pioneered the reproductive technologies on bison.
In its cooperative effort with federal and state agencies, the Wildlife Conservation Society assembled DNA information from more than 1,800 bison among 16 federal herds, with additional sampling from two publicly managed Canadian herds.
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