Response to Comment on “Individual heterozygosity predicts translocation success in threatened desert tortoises”.

Hedrick brings up several potential concerns that he feels challenge or limit our main finding. Hedrick does not comment on our empirical results, but rather argues that several factors may confound or invalidate our conclusion. Many of these concerns focus on unknown ecological aspects of the translocated tortoises, but we believe there is no reason to conclude that they bias the results or interpretation as presented in our original paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]