Captive populations provide a valuable insurance against extinctions in the wild. However, they are also vulnerable to the negative impacts of inbreeding, selection and drift. Genetic information is therefore considered a critical aspect of conservation management. Recent developments in sequencing technologies have the potential to improve the outcomes of management programmes; however, the transfer of these approaches to applied conservation has been slow. The scimitar‐horned oryx (Oryx dammah) is a North African antelope that has...

Sperm competition theory predicts that males should modulate sperm investment according to their social status. Sperm speed, one proxy of sperm quality, also influences the outcome of sperm competition because fast sperm cells may fertilize eggs before slow sperm cells. We evaluated whether the social status of males predicted their sperm speed in a wild population of dunnocks (Prunella modularis). In addition to the traditional analysis of the average speed of sperm cells per sample,...

Practical biodiversity conservation relies on delineation of biologically meaningful units. Manta and devil rays (Mobulidae) are threatened worldwide, yet morphological similarities and a succession of recent taxonomic changes impede the development of an effective conservation strategy. Here, we generate genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data from a geographically and taxonomically representative set of manta and devil ray samples to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships and evaluate species boundaries under the general lineage concept. We show that nominal...