CHARACTERISING THE POTENTIAL IMPACTS OF
IMMIGRATION
We assessed whether sloth immigration into our study area
occurred using a recently developed genetic kinship approach
(Palsbøll 1999; Peery et al. 2008). The number of parent–
offspring pairs in a sample of individuals should be relatively
low when immigration rates are high. Thus, we hypothesized
that few subadults should have a parent present in the population
if significant immigration occurs into our study area. As
part of previous studies of mating systems in sloths (Pauli &
Peery 2012; Peery & Pauli 2012), we genotyped almost all of the
individuals considered here using microsatellites developed by
(Moss et al. 2011, 2012). We used these genotypes to determine
how many subadults had a mother and/or a father in the sample
by determining which subadults shared at least one allele at all
loci with a conspecific adult. We limited this analysis to B. variegatus
because the probability of two unrelated individuals sharing
at least one allele at all loci purely by chance was only
00008 for B. variegatus compared to 00410 for C. hoffmanni,
given observed allele frequencies, the number of loci screened