Heredity, Natural Selection, and EvolutionSpecies and Population |
What is the bottleneck effect? |
The bottleneck effect is a term used to describe a population that has undergone some kind of temporary restriction that has severely reduced its genetic diversity. A bottlenecking event could be an epidemic or natural disaster like fire or flood. It is hypothesized that the lack of genetic diversity among African cheetahs is due to some bottlenecking event in the species’ past.