104 Mountain Lions of the Black Hills
also had initiated a harvest of mountain lions in the Badlands region of the state,
where the population was believed to have recolonized the region as a result of the
dispersal of lions from the Black Hills (Thompson 2009; Thompson and Jenks 2010).
We were able to compare the ge ne tics of these Dakota lion populations to the lion
database from Wyoming (Anderson, Lindzey, and McDonald 2004), which, again,
was originally based on 8 microsatellite loci (specific laboratory methodology can be
found in Thompson [2009] and Juarez [2014]).
Our first look at lion ge ne tics indicated that lions in the Black Hills averaged 4.3
alleles per locus and 86 alleles, levels associated with genet ically diverse lion popula-
tions. First indications were that mountain lions in the Black Hills had more alleles
than those from North Dakota, but this difference was likely due only to the large sam-
ple size of lions from the Black Hills compared to that for North Dakota. In fact,
when these data were scaled based on sample size, effective alleles ( t a b l e 7.1) were
much more similar between the two populations, and for some loci, lions in North
Dakota were more diverse. This result was our first indication that lions from outside
the Black Hills were at least partially involved with colonizing the North Dakota
figure 7.1. Tissue and blood samples were collected from mountain lions throughout
our studies of the species in the Black Hills (2001–2013). South Dakota Department of
Game, Fish and Parks.