Potential drivers and implications of a balanced breeding sex ratio in a small population of an imperiled species with environmental sex determination

Small populations of imperiled species are susceptible to the negative consequences of skewed sex ratios. In imperiled species with environmental sex determination such as sea turtles, examining sex ratios across a range of environments and population abundance levels can provide insight into factors that influence population resilience, which can then be the foci of management plans for these species. Breeding sex ratios (the ratio of actively breeding males to females during a reproductive season; BSRs) extrapolated from genetic parentage analyses are a common approach for enumerating sex ratios in sea turtles. Such analyses also allow for the characterization of multiple paternity within sea turtle clutches, which should reflect BSRs and breeding behaviors. We characterized the first BSR for a breeding assemblage of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) belonging to the temperate, low-abundance Northern Gulf of Mexico Recovery Unit using genotypes of 16 microsatellite loci from ne..., , , # Potential drivers and implications of a balanced breeding sex ratio in a small population of an imperiled species with environmental sex determination

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxfx](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxfx)

These data include: microsatellite genotypes across 16 loci for hatchling and female loggerhead sea turtles (*Caretta caretta*) sampled on St. George Island, Florida (SGI_loggerhead_genos_2022.csv); the output of COLONY 2.0 run using these microsatellite data (Colony_Output.csv); and an R markdown script used to analyze and visualize the COLONY output (SGI_BSR_Analyses.Rmd).

## Description of the data and file structure

Microsatellite genotype file (SGI_loggerhead_genos_2022.csv) includes one column for individual ID (*individual_id*), one column to identify whether the individual is a hatchling or a female (*lifestage*), and 32 columns for microsatellite alleles (two columns for each locus). Each locus (column header) is followed by \"A\" or \"B\" to di...