Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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]
The environment can directly affect the survival of a small population. Some detrimental effects include stochastic variation in the environment (year to year variation in rainfall, temperature), which can produce temporally correlated birth and death rates (i.e. 'good' years when birth rates are high and death rates are low and 'bad' years when birth rates are low and death rates are high ...
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 ...
Gene flow is the exchange of genes between populations or species, breaking down the structure. Examples of gene flow within a species include the migration and then breeding of organisms, or the exchange of pollen. Gene transfer between species includes the formation of hybrid organisms and horizontal gene transfer. Population genetic models ...
A survey of publications on 102 mostly wildlife animal and plant species yielded 192 N e /N ratios. Seven different estimation methods were used in the surveyed studies. Accordingly, the ratios ranged widely from 10-6 for Pacific oysters to 0.994 for humans, with an average of 0.34 across the examined species. Based on these data they ...