Inbreeding may already be causing an increase among wild condors in a lethal form of dwarfism, chondrodystrophy, and leading to an increase among some birds in the number of tail feathers, from 12 to 14. "You could even choose individual mates to, in a sense, reverse the inbreeding."Ĭo-author Cynthia Steiner, associate director in conservation genetics for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, a nonprofit conservation organization affiliated with the San Diego Zoo, agreed that the genomic information will help refine conservation strategies to maintain genetic diversity and reduce inbreeding. "They have this legacy of high genetic diversity from their former abundance, so I think there is a chance that, with genetic information, we could manage the population going into the future to really maintain the genetic diversity that they do have now and not have any further losses," Robinson said. The bird likely numbered in the tens of thousands, soaring and scavenging from New York and Florida to California and into Mexico. Robinson and her colleagues, including Rauri Bowie, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, used statistical techniques to estimate the bird's historical population and found that it was far more abundant across the United States a million years ago than even the turkey vulture, America's most common vulture today. The health of the bird's genome is probably due to the species' great abundance in the past. "Our study is the first to begin quantifying diversity across the entire California condor genome, which provides us a lot of baseline information and will inform future research and conservation." "You need genetic diversity in order to adapt, and the more genetic diversity they (California condors) have, hopefully, the more chance they have to adapt and persist," said Jacqueline Robinson, a UCSF postdoctoral fellow and first author of a paper about the analysis appearing today in the journal Current Biology. In comparing the complete genomes of two California condors with those of an Andean condor and a turkey vulture, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley scientists did find genetic evidence of inbreeding over the past few centuries, but, overall, a wealth of diversity across most of the genome.
That led to inbreeding that could have jeopardized the population's health and narrowed the bird's genetic diversity, which can reduce its ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Nearly 40 years ago, the state's wild condor population was down to a perilous 22.
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