Effects of Inbreeding on Populations

The benefits of environmental biodiversity--or more exactly the environmental risks of diminished biodiversity-- have been a staple of ecological studies for many years. The World Resources Institute advocates an active human role in encouraging and maintaining viable populations of wild-animal species, both in situ, or in the wild natural habitat of the animals, and ex situ, by way of captive-population management and maintenance (WRI, 1997). Inbreeding is relevant to this scheme of concerns because it can affect biodiversity for either good or ill, depending on the manner in which it occurs. The World Resources Institute's definition of inbreeding suggests why. WRI explains that inbreeding is

A mating system involving the mating or breeding of closely related individuals, the most extreme form of which is self-fertilization. It is used to "fix" economically useful genetic traits in genetically improved populations; however, it also can result in fixation of deleterious recessive alleles (WRI, 1997).

The fixing of useful traits is by and large a human project. It is readily evident in the deliberate inbreeding of plants. A British te

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the bug's ability to function as an agricultural pest. The literature suggests that, beginning with lower vertebrates and upward through the food chain, there are tendencies both toward and away from deliberate inbreeding within a species. These tendencies, which have been observed in laboratory and natural habitats, do not appear to have a uniform explanation. In some respects both findings and conclusions are controversial. The difficulty of coming up with simple, unambiguous theories to explain the impact of inbreeding on populations is indicated in Pope's examination (1992) of a population of monkeys in Venezuela that was joined by a new colony of the same species. The second colony, among which there was significant genetic evidence of inbreeding and observed evidence of incest mating, quickly diversified the genetic pool of the new combined colony, as well as exhibited more genetic diversity within itself than the original colony. Pope does not specifically attribute the genetic diversity to a biological factor. However, in another study of monkey populations, Melnick (1987) attributes it to social organization, specifically, the multiple-mating behavior of dominant males within so-called primate troops. One four-year longi
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