Puma Inbreeding

Pumas can be found all over the United States, as well as South America. Recently the entire genome has been sequenced revealing that the species is highly inbred. Starting in South America, pumas migrated to North America about 300,000 years ago. With analysis of their DNA, there were markers for inbreeding that is most likely to be caused by the wide area these animals are found, coupled with decreasing land to live with human interference. As the land shrunk, populations grew smaller and more sparred, and more isolated leaving the cats to reproduce with a limited gene pool. With this news scientists have tried to diversify the populations by moving individuals into other groups of pumas, but this has unfortunately not shown much improvement.



https://www.the-scientist.com/image-of-the-day/image-of-the-day--puma-genome-sequencing-66604
related link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2019-10-genome-sequencing-pumas-inbreeding.amp