Developing countries often have urgent national commitments regarding protection of biodiversity, but can be experience- or resource-limited to undertake conservation action. The eradication of invasive alien vertebrates (IAV), requiring a specialized set of skills and experience and sometimes significant capital investments, is a case in point. Building international collaborations to eradicate IAVs from islands is a potential approach to enhance the conservation of threatened species within countries that do not have sufficient capacity or funding. Here, we present a case study, the successful removal of invasive house mice from Allen Cay, Exuma Islands, The Bahamas. The goal of the project was to protect Audubon’s shearwaters and improve breeding habitat for the endemic Allen Cay rock iguana. The project was collaboratively planned and implemented by two previously unassociated organizations, the Bahamas National Trust (BNT) and Island Conservation (IC). Both organizations brought unique skillsets to the project: BNT provided compliance and local biological expertise, and IC provided eradication project management. Local capacity to implement future eradication projects was strengthened through BNT’s ownership and management of the project, and a strong partnership now exists to increase the scale and efficacy of future Bahamian island eradication projects to protect threatened species. Efforts to expand and coordinate an international network of practitioners conducting IAV eradications will require an improved understanding of the threats posed by IAVs, access to technical support, exposure to best practices, and the empowerment of local agencies to invest in the protection of biodiversity on islands.

A selective sweep is the result of strong positive selection driving newly occurring or standing genetic variants to fixation, and can dramatically alter the pattern and distribution of allelic diversity in a population. Population-level sequencing data have enabled discoveries of selective sweeps associated with genes involved in recent adaptations in many species. In contrast, much debate but little evidence addresses whether selfish genes are capable of fixation-thereby leaving signatures identical to classical selective sweeps-despite being neutral or deleterious to organismal fitness. We previously described R2d2, a large copy-number variant that causes nonrandom segregation of mouse Chromosome 2 in females due to meiotic drive. Here we show population-genetic data consistent with a selfish sweep driven by alleles of R2d2 with high copy number (R2d2(HC)) in natural populations. We replicate this finding in multiple closed breeding populations from six outbred backgrounds segregating for R2d2 alleles. We find that R2d2(HC) rapidly increases in frequency, and in most cases becomes fixed in significantly fewer generations than can be explained by genetic drift. R2d2(HC) is also associated with significantly reduced litter sizes in heterozygous mothers, making it a true selfish allele. Our data provide direct evidence of populations actively undergoing selfish sweeps, and demonstrate that meiotic drive can rapidly alter the genomic landscape in favor of mutations with neutral or even negative effects on overall Darwinian fitness. Further study will reveal the incidence of selfish sweeps, and will elucidate the relative contributions of selfish genes, adaptation and genetic drift to evolution.