Beth Shapiro

And when Texas panthers were introduced in the mid 1990s, that population recovered.

They stopped.

They had a disorder called cryptorchidism where their testicles wouldn't descend or only one would descend.

They had all sorts of heart problems.

They had because there's a small breeding population because there were very few of them.

And so no genetic diversity.

The choice was to mate with your family.

That's it.

And things want to survive, so they do.

So you get these highly inbred populations, and people fixed it by moving an animal from one population to another, introducing new genetic diversity.

It's called genetic rescue, right?

And that's a great way of bringing diversity back into a population.

It's what we're trying to do with our Red Wolf Project.

Red wolves are one of the most endangered wolf species in the world.

They're the only endemic American wolf species.

And they are nearly extinct.

There's a successful captive breeding program.

And a few years ago, some of the people that we work with at Colossal, a woman called Bridget Von Holt, who's at Princeton, who's a friend of mine, she was working and discovered because people were sending her photos.

See, this is why you have to pay attention to people who you think might be crazy when they send you pictures of things.

You know, look at this cool, crazy thing that I think I found.