Population Genetics
In population genetics, a population bottleneck occurs when the effective population size, Ne, sharply decreases to a small percentage of the original. The immediate effect of a population bottleneck is to decrease genetic diversity, promoting the effects of stochastic genetic drift over natural selection. In the long-term, repeated population bottlenecks can severely decrease population fitness: deleterious alleles are able to accumulate especially where the time interval between bottlenecks does not allow for the generation of new alleles through mutation.
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