Say you have a handful of animals left from a species and you want to increase their numbers by basically getting them to screw in every which way but here’s the thing: wouldn’t all the next generation be related? After that the more babies they make the more inbred they’ll be. I feel like at the end, instead of saving the species, you would’ve created a new, different and really genetically poor species like pugs. Is that an issue they address?
In: Biology
It is indeed quite tricky and hard to avoid. They will try as well as they can to transport animals around between different zoos and reserves to take advantage of the full genetic diversity. But more importantly they examine the animals for genetic diseases and then try to breed the animals in such a way that these diseses goes extinct. The dangers of inbreeding is that these diseases will circulate freely among the limited populated and that recessive diseases will show itself more often. By carefully monitoring these it is possible to reduce this danger. This is kind of the opposite of what they are doing with dog breeding where genetic diseases are either ignored and diseased animals are just given life extending treatment so they can be bread and make lots of offspring or the genetic diseases are in some cases promoted. This is why pugs have such a hard time breathing as their malformed noses are favored over their natural short noses.
It’s tricky, but in the research I did, it all depends how many functional breeding pairs there are. If you have 2 males and 2 females, 1+1 got together, 2+2 go together and they should hopefully reproduce enough to create two new, non-inbred pairs. If there is 1 male, 1 female tbh inbreeding is necessary. Hopefully in the next few years (what with ‘cloning’) we should be able to create new animals literally out of thin air. Until then, imbreeding is unfortunately necessary.
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