What is it about?
Inbreeding depression—decreased survival and/or reproduction caused by parental relatedness—can reduce population viability and thus is a frequent focus in conservation. However, inbreeding depression is difficult to detect in wild populations. In two small populations of eastern massasauga rattlesnakes, we combined 12+ years of monitoring efforts with genomic data to reveal that inbreeding decreases reproduction and survival—a clear sign of inbreeding depression. Populations also show fine-scale spatial clustering of relatives, likely due to limited dispersal and the natural history of the species. This pattern contributes to inbreeding and, in turn, inbreeding depression.
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Photo by Elly Kelders on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our work demonstrates the consequences of habitat fragmentation, which has likely reduced migration among populations of eastern massasaugas, and the importance of long-term studies to understand the intersection of life history and demography and its implications for conservation.
Perspectives
This study was made possible by two long-term monitoring projects that were started a full decade before this project began, and well before advances in genomic technologies made it possible and affordable to obtain genetic data from so many individuals of a non-model species. It's impossible to overstate the importance of long-term monitoring to both the conservation of imperiled species and to collect data that can be used in the future to answer questions we can't even dream of today.
Meaghan Clark
University of California Santa Cruz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Inbreeding reduces fitness in spatially structured populations of a threatened rattlesnake, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2501745122.
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