Florida moves more than 10,000 gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) a year away from development sites to protected recipient sites — a huge, unplanned “common garden” experiment in what happens when genetically and geographically distant tortoises are suddenly mixed together. Using nest data from Nokuse Plantation, a major recipient site in the Florida panhandle, we found two things: hatching success declined as the genetic and geographic distance between a nest’s mother and father increased (a sign of outbreeding depression), and mothers from northeast Florida had consistently lower hatching success than mothers from other regions, regardless of climate.
These results suggest that admixture among long-separated tortoise populations can carry a real reproductive cost — a consideration that translocation programs rarely account for when choosing which source populations to mix.
Citation: Loope, K.J., DeSha, J.N., Aresco, M.J., Shoemaker, K.T., Hunter, E.A. 2024. Common-garden experiment reveals outbreeding depression and region-of-origin effects on reproductive success in a frequently translocated tortoise. Animal Conservation. https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.12977