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As with any initial proj ect working on a new species in a new area, when we began
working on mountain lions in the Black Hills, we had to base all of our hypotheses on
what was known about lions in other systems. Even armed with this information, we
knew we were dealing with a species believed to have recently recolonized the Black
Hills. Therefore, our immediate questions included those aimed at recolonizing pop-
ulations. For example, we asked, Where did the first lions in the Black Hills come from?
Were lions always in the Black Hills, but at such a low population size that they
remained secretive and were rarely seen? If the population was low, would we expect
it to suffer from ge ne tic issues such as low heterozygosity or limited variability among
alleles, either of which could make Black Hills lions somewhat unusual genet ically and
potentially vulnerable to abnormalities that have afflicted the Florida panther? Factors
such as ge ne tic drift and natu ral se lection also could negatively affect a newly re-
established population.
Our first captures of lions provided some indications that healthy individuals, both
males and females, made up the Black Hills population. We documented individuals
that did not display the usual ge ne tic characteristics relegated to homozygous lions,
such as undescended testes and crooked tails (Maehr 1997). Nevertheless, if the
population had been extinct or recently recolonized, it could exhibit a “founder
effect,” which is seen when only a few individuals colonize or occur in a region and
those individuals are responsible for all or most of the breeding, thus limiting ge ne tic
diversity in the population as it increases in size. If diversity was limited, then the
population could suffer from susceptibility to disease or might decline at a faster rate
than expected in response to some catastrophe that affected the population.
Some of our original questions were answered when we provided samples to the
University of Wyoming, where a study of lion ge ne tics was being conducted (Ander-
CHAPTER 7