how do endangered species deal with inbreeding?

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how do endangered species deal with inbreeding?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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