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- Title
Reintroduction of the endangered Perdido Key beach mouse (Peromyscus polionotus trissyllepsis): fate and movements of captive-born animals.
- Authors
Greene, Daniel U.; Gore, Jeffery A.; Stoddard, Margo A.
- Abstract
The Perdido Key beach mouse (Peromyscus polionotus trissyllepsis) is an endangered rodent endemic to a barrier island at the Florida-Alabama border. Land development, tropical storms, and non-native predators have caused mouse populations to be extirpated from some areas, including Gulf State Park where mice have been absent since 1997. Because wild populations were too small to be donors, we used captive-born beach mice to reestablish a population at Gulf State Park. We released 48 mice into soft-release pens in March 2010. We monitored the fate and movements of 28 mice with radio-collars, and assessed changes in the population size through livetrapping. During the first week, we found 15 radio-collars at a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) den and after two weeks the total number of known surviving mice had declined to 13. Many of these mice used the pens for food and shelter and remained in the area of their release (<100 m movements). After 12-weeks, 17 wild-born mice had been captured. Knowing that captive-born individuals can be introduced into vacant habitat and successfully rear offspring provides biologists with an alternate management option for conserving endangered beach mice when populations of wild mice are too low to allow translocations.
- Subjects
PERDIDO Key (Ala. &; Fla.); PEROMYSCUS
- Publication
Florida Scientist, 2016, Vol 79, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0098-4590
- Publication type
Article