In my managing a habitat testing of improving the gene pool, I saw enough that I felt comfortable that on an individual herd level, there were not significant indications that herds had their own gene pool that made a noticeable difference, but I did not spend much time trying to convincingly prove that even to myself. LiquidFire recently did a bit of work on that specific topic that I found very interesting and was very happy that he shared.

From my understanding of what he did, he focused on a single herd at a time. He captured the fitness of each member. Over multiple runs, removed some animals to see if respawns were driven by that herd’s average fitness enough to make a trend. This would indicate that you can improve a herd’s gene pool to get better respawns by only managing that herd. His findings as I understand it, was that the respawns were extremely random, however he managed that single herd, at a time.

To me this tends to confirm the theory that the gene pool for respawns are really at the habitat level, not the individual herd level. I don’t see this as bad, but it does help to understand how it is working, 46 which later in chapter 5 offers a few ways that I see to manage animals, that all work. Here is LiquidFire’s work that he shared.