Congratulations to Dr Maria Diez Leon - One of the most downloaded papers
Animal Welfare Science and Ethics Lecturer Dr. Maria Diez Leon, along with collaborators, have written one of Zoo Biology's most downloaded papers. Congratulations to their Team!
The paper is entitled - Improving the sustainability of ex situ populations with mate choice. See it here.
Short blurb: Breeding animals can be tricky. Conservation breeding managers carefully select which genetically valuable individuals should reproduce, yet most of these recommended pairings fail in practice, and are commonly attributed to 'pair incompatibility'. In this paper we review one reason why this might be so - that individuals have evolved to choose which conspecifics they mate with - and the success of the few programmes that have implemented mate choice paradigms. We also summarise why allowing mate choice might have welfare benefits, as well as how improving animal welfare of the individuals in these programmes can increase the 'sexy-ness' of potential mates.
