J. R. DePriest :verified_trans: :donor: :Moopsy: :EA DATA. SF:They Removed 131 Cats From an Island—What Happened to the Ecosystem Next Defied All Scientific Logic
Between 2010 and 2013, conservation teams on Chichijima—one of the main islands in the Ogasawara chain—captured and removed 131 feral cats. The goal was to reduce predation pressure on the endangered pigeon, whose population had dropped despite existing protections. The results were immediate: adult pigeon numbers rose from 111 to 966, and juvenile counts jumped from 9 to 189, according to data published in Communications Biology.
I love cats but outdoor cats are a menace and feral outdoor cats are even worse because they never "go in".
The real meat of the article is about how this tiny population avoided genetic degredation.
This phenomenon, known as genetic purging, occurs when small populations gradually eliminate deleterious mutations through natural selection. Over centuries of isolation and low population size, harmful alleles may have been systematically removed from the gene pool. The result: a population with low diversity, but also reduced genetic load.
That's awesome and shows that "life, uh, finds a way."
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