Eli5, how do conservationist deal with inbreeding gene pool when trying to bring back species from being endangered?
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By very carefully managing which members of the species breeds with who. There’s a concept called the 50/500 rule, where you would need 50 members of a species to repopulate without inbreeding, and 500 to avoid any sort of “genetic drift” (a change in the genome of just this new population vs the old)
Of course the bigger the initial population is always better, but theoretically you could bring back an entire species with just one breeding pair, it would just be very difficult, have a very high chance of failure, and have long term effects on the species as a whole.
It would also be ideal if these 50 initial members were also not related to begin with, but when dealing with conservation, you get what you get.
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