Bottleneck And Founder Effects Of Genetic Drift

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Genetic drift has two types the bottleneck and founder effects. With the bottleneck effect the one generation of a species is reduced so that genetic variations can take effect more quickly. One example of bottleneck is the Northern elephant seal that was hunted by humans in the late 1800’s. They were almost extinct but have made a small comeback. They still have marks of the bottleneck; however the southern elephant seal has much less genetic variation because they were not hunted as much. Another way to describe bottleneck is when a catastrophe strikes and kills off most of a population it must be all of a sudden. It must kill individuals irrespective of the genes. Natural selection happens only when a portion of the population without certain