Characteristic and Causes of Inbreeding
•Inbreeding is inevitable in small populations, even if
mating is managed, after only a small
number of generations the number of relatives exceeds the number of founders contributing to the populations gene pool.
Consequently the genomes of all
possible mating pairs will share many alleles identical by descent.
•Inbreeding exposes recessive deleterious traits.
•Large outbreeding populations carry deleterious mutants (genetic load).
•Small, inbred populations will therefore express genetic
load as inbreeding depression.
•Inbreeding depression result in reduced fitness.