how do endangered species deal with inbreeding?
In: 614
In nature, they do not, which further leads to rapid collapse.
Part of human intervention in trying to rehabilitate a species is doing as much as possible to increase diversity, as soon as possible.
For example lions in South Africa have lost a lot diversity, and now responsible breeders are using lions from much further north in Africa to improve diversity.
They don’t, really. Having a sharp fall in the population can reduce genetic diversity in a way that impacts descendants, even if numbers later recover, because there just weren’t many individual ancestors. Endangered species may be stuck with inbreeding.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck)
However, some inbreeding isn’t the end of the world in terms of evolutionary fitness, and while too much inbreeding can have negative impacts on a population ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression)) it’s not always a huge problem. Inbred populations of animals happen worldwide. Think about purebred dogs, which are highly inbred and do routinely suffer from specific genetic problems, yet are overall still pretty capable.
From a natural selection point of view, dying without passing on genes is a guaranteed loss, while inbreeding is a likely win with modest risk.
Very carefully. Zoos and other facilities that are trying to increase breeding will track the family lines and will transport the animals to encourage the widest possible genetic diversity.
Very carefully.
If left to their own devices, inbreeding will likely be a problem, but with human intervention, we can help.
Basically we can create a healthy gene pool from 50 healthy individuals, and we can leave them be to reproduce on their own with 500 healthy individuals.
These are just general guidelines and doesn’t apply if there is already heavy inbreeding or all the individuals are already related. In any case, the more individuals, the better.
if they fall into that critically low level they might already be doomed unless it leads to mutations that somehow benefit them. they might not be able ot solve this unless they exist in multiple habitats and can migrate between them.
for instance cheetahs are known to be in this sort of genetic bottleneck to the point where a major part of their population are Heavily inbred.