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Founder effect: The original population (left) could give rise to different founder populations (right). In population genetics, the founder effect is the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population.
A slightly different form of bottleneck can occur if a small group becomes reproductively (e.g., geographically) separated from the main population, such as through a founder event, e.g., if a few members of a species successfully colonize a new isolated island, or from small captive breeding programs such as animals at a zoo.
Population size is directly associated with amount of genetic drift, and is the underlying cause of effects like population bottlenecks and the founder effect. [1] Genetic drift is the major source of decrease of genetic diversity within populations which drives fixation and can potentially lead to speciation events. [1]
Another possible cause of genetic divergence is the bottleneck effect. The bottleneck effect is when an event, such as a natural disaster, causes a large portion of the population to die. By chance, certain genetic patterns will be overrepresented in the remaining population, which is similar to what happens with the founder effect. [4]
A bottleneck can reduce or eliminate genetic variation from a population. Further drift events after the bottleneck event can also reduce the population's genetic diversity. The lack of diversity created can make the population at risk to other selective pressures. [36] A common example of a population bottleneck is the Northern elephant seal ...
Other causes include gene flow from migrations, population bottlenecks and expansions, founder effects, evolutionary pressure, random chance, and (in humans) cultural factors. Even in lieu of these factors, individuals tend to stay close to where they were born, which means that alleles will not be distributed at random with respect to the full ...
The founder effect is a special case of a population bottleneck, occurring when a small group in a population splinters off from the original population and forms a new one. The random sample of alleles in the just formed new colony is expected to grossly misrepresent the original population in at least some respects. [ 44 ]
Similar to the bottleneck effect, the founder's effect can also cause allele fixation. The founder effect occurs when a small founding population is moved to a new area and propagates the future population. This can be seen in the Alces alces moose population in Newfoundland, Canada. Moose are not native to Newfoundland, and in 1878 and 1904 ...