How would you compare and contrast the founder effect and the bottleneck effect?
1 Answer
Jan 12, 2016
For the population in question, the effects would be similar, but the founder effect leaves the parent population intact.
Explanation:
Both the founder effect and bottleneck effect result in a small population with a subset of the genetic diversity of the original population.
In the bottleneck effect, most of the original population is wiped out, leaving only the remaining few, and that population goes on (or not) to be the sole descendants of the original population.
With the founder effect, the parent population remains intact, so there are two populations of the species which may evolve separately (due to different selective pressures in the different locations), or which may recombine again into a single population.
