Genetic Diversity - Bottlenecks and the Founder Effect

• The more alleles a population has, the more diverse it is genetically.
• Mutations in DNA and new members migrating into the population (gene flow) both add to the variation of alleles.

A genetic bottleneck:

• When an event causes a massive reduction in the number of organisms in a population, so there aren't as many of them to reproduce
• There are less alleles in the gene pool as a result
• This reduces genetic diversity
• A common example of this is the Northern Elephant Seals, which were hunted a lot and so their population was reduced. Then a few individuals went on to reproduce and the numbers slowly rose, but they had less of a variation of alleles.

The Founder Effect: when a few individuals start a new colony - there's more inbreeding (ew) and so more genetic disease.

So this could be like the…