7. If this were always the case, why should we be worried about small population

Question

7. If this were always the case, why should we be worried about small populations? Under what conditions might you expect a population not to increase when reduced to low population size? This certainly has been the case for many endangered species that have gone extinct or now teeter on the edge. Do some populations simply not ?have what it takes? to maintain healthy levels?

5. Fill in the expected times to extinction for the range of population sines (N) and standard deviation of population growth rate (S) in Table DAT 7-1: 7. If this were always the case, why should we be worried about small populations? Under what conditions might you expect a population not to increase when reduced to low population size? This certainly has been the case for many endangered species that have gone extinct or now teeter on the edge. Do some populations simply not have what it takes to maintain healthy levels?

Explanation / Answer

In general, small populations are at a greater risk of extinction than large populations. Several reasons attributed to this:

Genetic variability may be lost due to genetic drift. Genetic drift is the gradual loss of rare alleles from a population hence impacting the gene pool of the population. For example if a rare allele has a frequency of 5% in population. If the population size is 1000 then 100 copies are present in the population (1000 X 2 copies per individual in diploid organisms X 0.5). Now if the population is reduced to 10 then there will be 1 copy of allele present in the population.

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