text: Managing populations based on minimizing mean kinship values is often an effective way to increase genetic diversity and to avoid inbreeding within captive populations.  Kinship is the probability that two alleles will be identical by descent when one allele is taken randomly from each mating individual.  The mean kinship value is the average kinship value between a given individual and every other member of the population.  Mean kinship values can help determine which individuals should be mated.  In choosing individuals for breeding, it is important to choose individuals with the lowest mean kinship values because these individuals are least related to the rest of the population and have the least common alleles.  This ensures that rarer alleles are passed on, which helps to increase genetic diversity.  It is also important to avoid mating two individuals with very different mean kinship values because such pairings propagate both the rare alleles that are present in the individual with the low mean kinship value as well as the common alleles that are present in the individual with the high mean kinship value.  This genetic management technique requires that ancestry is known, so in circumstances where ancestry is unknown, it might be necessary to use molecular genetics such as microsatellite data to help resolve unknowns.