Another potential concern is genetic health. Despite rebounding to their predecline numbers, the species was so severely culled that the amount of variation in its gene pool might have been compromised.

　　Such a population bottleneck could impact the foxs ability to deal with disease or environmental change, said Gary Roemer, a biologist at New Mexico State University who has studied the island foxes.

　　One controversial solution would be to interbreed different subspecies of island foxes, Roemer said. A similar strategy was recently used to bolster the genetic health of Florida panthers, drawing on DNA from cougars from Texas.

　　Coonan said he is happy to shift from worrying about the fate of the foxes to monitoring their health.

　　Its actually a great stage to be here in the island recovery, he said. I can sleep a little bit more at night because of everything thats gone on.

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