Summary
Bottleneck experiments were performed on the tropical butterfly Bicyclus anynana. The reasons for choosing a species of butterfly are described together with the methodology used in the population cage experiments. Replicated lines founded by single pairs and then measured in generation 2 or 3 showed strong phenotypic differentiation, declines in heritabilities of morphological traits, dramatic reductions in egg fertility (due to inbreeding depression) and an increased sensitivity to insecticide applications (probably due to a loss of alleles conferring tolerance) relative to unbottlenecked control lines. Egg fertility showed some recovery in further generations. An experiment involving repeat bottlenecks provided support for the hypothesis that a purging of deleterious alleles contributed to this “fitness rebound”. The preliminary results are examined in the context of developing guidelines in conservation genetics.
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Brakefield, P.M., Saccheri, I.J. (1994). Guidelines in conservation genetics and the use of the population cage experiments with butterflies to investigate the effects of genetic drift and inbreeding. In: Loeschcke, V., Jain, S.K., Tomiuk, J. (eds) Conservation Genetics. EXS, vol 68. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-8510-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-8510-2_14
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