Journal ArticleDOI
Case Study of a Population Bottleneck: Lions of the Ngorongoro Crater
Craig Packer,Anne E. Pusey,Henry Allan Rowley,Dennis A. Gilbert,Janice S. Martenson,Stephen J. O'Brien +5 more
TLDR
The simulations suggest that the Crater population may have passed through previous bottlenecks before 1962 but that the level of heterozygosity in the breeding population has been declining since the mid-1970s, regardless of the population's genetic composition in the 1960s.Abstract:
Lions in the Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, form a small and naturally isolated population. In 1962, the Crater lions suffered an epizootic that reduced the population to nine females and one male. An additional seven males apparently immigrated into the Crater in 1964–1965, but there has been no further immigration into the Crater in the past 25 years. By 1975, the population had recovered to its current level of 75-125 animals. All members of the current Crater population are descended from only 15 founders, and over the years there has been considerable variance in the reproductive success of both sexes. The Crater was probably colonized by lions from the nearby Serengeti ecosystem and the contemporary Crater lion population shows a significant lack of genetic diversity compared to the much larger Serengeti population. The detailed reproductive history of the Crater population was incorporated into a series of stochastic computer simulations that generated distributions of expected allele frequencies under different sets of initial conditions. The simulations suggest that the Crater population may have passed through previous bottlenecks before 1962 but that the level of heterozygosity in the breeding population has been declining since the mid-1970s, regardless of the population's genetic composition in the 1960s. High levels of inbreeding are correlated with increased levels of sperm abnormality in lions and there is evidence that the reproductive performance of the Crater lions has decreased as a result of decreasing heterozygosity.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Do island populations have less genetic variation than mainland populations
TL;DR: A large and highly significant majority of island populations have less allozyme genetic variation than their mainland counterparts, the average reduction being 29 per cent, and the magnitude of differences was related to dispersal ability.
Journal ArticleDOI
Effects of population bottlenecks on genetic diversity as measured by allozyme electrophoresis.
TL;DR: The composition and number of founders of 55 experimental populations of the eastern mosquitofish, maintained under simulated field conditions, were manipulated to examine the effects of bottlenecks on three components of allozyme diversity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Limitation of African Wild Dogs by Competition with Larger Carnivores
Scott Creel,Nancy Marusha Creel +1 more
TL;DR: Data suggest that competition with spotted hyaenas may limit or exclude wild dogs when hyaena density is high, and competition with lions appears less intense, but direct predation by lions on wild dogs is important.
Journal ArticleDOI
Genetic diversity and the survival of populations
TL;DR: A range of factors is considered that may influence the significance of genetic diversity for the survival of a population and the possibilities for application of current knowledge on genetic diversity and population survival for the management of natural populations are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Does inbreeding affect the extinction risk of small populations?: predictions from Drosophila
TL;DR: It is shown that inbred populations have a significantly higher short‐term probability of extinction than non‐inbred populations, even for low levels of inbreeding, and that the extinction probability increases with increasing inbreeding levels.
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