Show me your tail, if you have one! Is inbreeding depression occurring in wildcats (Felis silvestris silvestris) from Italy?

How admixed captive breeding populations could be rescued using local ancestry information

This paper asks the question: can genomic information be used to recover a species that is already on the pathway to extinction due to genetic swamping from a related and more numerous population? We show that a breeding strategy in a captive breeding program can use whole genome sequencing to identify and remove segments of DNA introgressed through hybridisation. The proposed policy uses a generalized measure of kinship or heterozygosity accounting for local ancestry, that is, whether a specific genetic location was inherited from the target of conservation. We then show that optimizing these measures would minimize undesired ancestry while also controlling kinship and/or heterozygosity, in a simulated breeding population. The process is applied to real data representing the hybridized Scottish wildcat breeding population, with the result that it should be possible to breed out domestic cat ancestry. The ability to reverse introgression is a powerful tool brought about through the combination of sequencing with computational advances in ancestry estimation. Since it works best when applied early in the process, important decisions need to be made about which genetically distinct populations should benefit from it and which should be left to reform into a single population.

Gone before it’s known? Camera-trapping shows alarming levels of putative hybrids in the wildcat (Felis silvestris) population of the Gargano National Park (Southern Italy)

The European wildcat is a small carnivore widespread across Europe and hybridization with the domestic cat is one of the major threats to wildcats. We estimate the population density of wild-living cats (both wildcats and putative hybrids based on pelage) in the Gargano National Park (Southern Italy). We sampled 20 stations for 540 camera days. We obtained 23 images from 17 detections at 10 cameras, and we identified 10 individuals (6 wildcats and 4 putative hybrids). Population density was estimated at 0.34 ± 0.15 SE wild-living cats/km2. The proportion of putative hybrids indicates an alarming hybridization for this population.