Genetics of Mountain Lions 107(SD: n = 26; ND: n = 6), indicating that lions from other regions of North Amer i ca
contributed to the recolonization of both populations. That finding agreed with our
expectations for mountain lions in the Black Hills, because we knew that individuals
likely dispersed to the region from Wyoming, but the finding did not agree with our
initial hypothesis for the lions that colonized the Badlands region of North Dakota.
In that case, we had assumed that lions just continued to move north from the Black
Hills, because the timing seemed to fit well with colonization first of the Black Hills
and then of the Badlands.
This result also differed from statements made by some biologists involved with the
Eastern Cougar Network, who had concluded that all mountain lions documented east
of the Black Hills had come from the Black Hills region and thus that any reduction
in Black Hills lions, through harvest or other factors, would reduce the natu ral recolo-
nization of more eastern states. Nevertheless, our findings of unique alleles in both
populations indicated that there was considerable movement of lions in the west (in-
cluding lions in Montana, Wyoming, and even Colorado) that were dispersing to the
east. Thus, multiple lion populations were involved with the recolonization of the
Dakotas, and given the long dispersal distances that could be attained by lions, these
alternative populations could represent the home areas of some of those first individ-
uals that had headed even farther east to states such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa,
Illinois, and Missouri.
Our analy sis of both Dakota lion populations also provided information supporting
the belief that the species had reestablished from just a few individuals that had
“founded” these populations (Thompson 2009; Juarez 2014). Nevertheless, these
mountain lion populations showed no deleterious effects from those few founding in-
dividuals. Considering that residents and recreationalists from both regions had be-
gun seeing and reporting observations of mountain lions in the 1990s through the very
early years of the 2000s and that mountain lions were believed to be at low densities
at that time, this finding made sense. However, the “new” alleles and the high ge ne tic
diversity also implied that individuals from vari ous states and populations had been
moving into the region(s) during that time (most likely males, but potentially some
females) and that those new individuals had contributed to the breeding populations
for both regions of the Dakotas (fig. 7.2).
The use of a larger number of microsatellite loci than had been used in previous
work also allowed us to use assignment tests that provide an indication of the origin
of the individual animals. When these tests were conducted, samples from 2 of the
18 lions that had been collected by North Dakota Game and Fish, either from harvested
lions or from other carcasses within the state bound aries, were actually assigned to
the Black Hills population, meaning they were more similar, genet ically, to Black Hills
lions than to other lions in the North Dakota Badlands. However, these lions had died
east of the Badlands region and thus were dispersing lions that for some reason had
bypassed the Badlands region of western North Dakota. This finding was somewhat