How do animal populations that start with extremely small numbers diversify without horrific inbreeding?

399 viewsBiologyOther

Just to give a few quick examples;

Australia was dominated by marsupials until only very recently in geologic time, and the general idea of why they flourish there but are rare or absent across the rest of the planet is that they were able to colonize Australia via migrating across Antarctica (warm at this time period) from South America. However, Australia was not directly connected by land, and the ‘placental’ mammals were also present in the same region at the same time period. Thus the suggestion is that the marsupials just happened to exploit an opportunity at a very brief window of time. Such a brief window suggests, at least to me, that the total founding member count cannot of have been very high. Not million of individuals, and even hundreds feels generous.

Monkeys reached South America from Africa by ‘rafting’. Not as in, building a physical raft, but being blown across in storms in either large trees, mats of vegetation, or chunks of landmass that were dislodged. For the monkeys to have bred they would have had to be closely related species (so a baboon and a chimpanzee wouldn’t be able to start a founding population even if both were blown over there), and given the sheer amount of distance and how closely groups would have to have arrived to meet and breed, this also seems like it only happened once. I don’t imagine you could fit hundreds of monkeys on even a large tree.

Lastly, all the species of true crocodiles in the Americas are not only descended from african crocodiles, either blown in or having swum the enormous amount of distance, but genetics seem to suggest that all, at some point in relatively recent history, were descended from the same female individual. Whether a single pregnant female made the journey and led to various descendance through inbreeding, or several crocodiles were blown over but only one female survived, the result is the same.

In all cases it seems that enormous variety has arisen from very small pockets of closely related animals. How have these animals ‘beaten’ the issues that arise from inbreeding?

In: Biology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

One important thing to know is that the starting population may have had a lot of genetic diversity. Humans actually do *not* have very much genetic diversity compared to many other species, so a lot of our assumptions of how bad inbreeding is are overestimates when applied to other species.

That said, inbreeding can and does lead to problems, and the animals we see now are the species who managed to survive this. Plenty did not. I have seen some speculation that woolly mammoths isolated on islands in prehistoric times died out due to inbreeding. [Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1827/)

Inbreeding in and of itself does not make problems out of nothing. A lot of the problems associated with inbreeding come from specific recessive traits. You have one copy of every gene that came from your mother, and another copy that came from your father. Recessive traits are if you have one copy of the recessive allele (allele = version of a gene, when people talk about genes colloquially usually they mean allele) and one copy of a different allele, you have no issues, but if you have two copies of the recessive allele, you do have issues. If the founding population has the recessive allele, it constitutes a higher proportion of the population and thus there will be more individuals who have two recessive copies and thus have the inbreeding-related disease. Enzyme deficiencies are a really common example of this, where there’s a mutant version of a gene for producing a particular enzyme that either does not work, or produces only very little. But if you have one fully functional copy, that one copy is able to make more than enough of the enzyme so you have no issues at all. The problems only arise if both copies of the gene are nonfunctional.

If, by chance, the founder population does not have any of these mutations, then the descendants aren’t going to have that many issues.

You are viewing 1 out of 4 answers, click here to view all answers.