Mountain Lions of the Black Hills

106 Mountain Lions of the Black Hills

the lower levels of diversity, the indication was that, relative to other populations, the
Dakotas (both the Black Hills and the North Dakota Badlands) had sufficient diver-
sity to at least maintain genet ically healthy populations in the short term, provided
there was no cataclysmic factor that substantially reduced these populations quickly.
It also could be noted that other carnivore populations had higher levels of ge ne tic
diversity than mountain lion populations in the Dakotas, and therefore there was a
possibility that ge ne tic diversity levels could increase above those presently docu-
mented ( t a b l e 7. 3).
Our findings on the ge ne tics of mountain lions supported the original work by
Anderson, Lindzey, and McDonald (2004) and provided analytical evidence that par-
alleled what our visual observations of captured and collected lions had indicated:
that Black Hills lions were genet ically diverse and that there did not seem to be any
risk of depleting that diversity through the limited harvest that was initiated in 2005.
The other in ter est ing finding obtained from this analy sis was that the Black Hills
population as well as the North Dakota Badlands population had unique alleles

Table 7.2. Mean and standard error of ge ne tic variability metrics for Dakota mountain lions

South Dakota North Dakota

Mean SEM Mean SEM

Alleles/locus 4.3 0.356 3.3 0.282
Allele with freq ≥5% 3.3 0.252 2.6 0.169
Effective alleles/locus 2.442 0.162 2.223 0.148
No. of alleles 1.3 0.291 0.3 0.147
Alleles exclusive to
HE 0.542 0.041 0.504 0.039
HO 0.547 0.044 0.526 0.046

Source: Thompson 2009.

Table 7.3. Comparison of observed heterozygosity (HO) levels of mountain lions

in the Black Hills with other mountain lion populations and other carnivore species

Species Region HO Source

M. lion Utah 0.47 Sinclair et al. 2001; 9 loci
M. lion Western US 0.42–0.52 Culver et al. 2000; 10 loci
M. lion California 0.36–0.42 Riley et al. 2014; 54 loci
Cheetaha South Africa 0.39 Menotti- Raymond and O’Brien 1995
African liona Africa 0.66 Menotti- Raymond and O’Brien 1995
Leoparda Africa 0.77 Spong, Johansson, and Björklund 2000
Brown beara Kodiak Islands 0.30 Paetkau et al. 1998
Gray wolf a US 0.54 Roy et al. 1994

Sourcea : Adapted from Thompson 2009.
Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatis), African lion (Panthera leo), leopard (Panthera pardus), brown bear (Ursus arctos),
and gray wolf (Canis lupus).