Speaker
Description
Anthropogenic changes mean that many populations are becoming increasingly small and isolated. The loss of fitness due to inbreeding, aka inbreeding depression, is a major concern for these populations, potentially contributing to their extinction. Genetic diversity can be introduced into the inbred population via the translocation of individuals (Genetic rescue), reducing inbreeding depression. However, the ideal rescuer to use in such situations is highly debated. Rescuers from a large, outbred population which will be more genetically diverse may also risk introducing recessive deleterious alleles. Alternatively, rescuers from other small, inbred populations will likely have purged deleterious alleles but will introduce less new genetic diversity. To explore this issue, we have performed experimental genetic rescue utilising the model species Tribolium castaneum. Inbred populations that have experienced three generations where they were bottlenecked to a single pair, were rescued by either an outbred individual or an inbred individual from another population. Control populations received no rescue. Fitness was measured as the number of offspring surviving to maturity at each generation, over a total of ten generations. After five generations, results show that all rescued populations had increased productivity compared to non-rescued control populations. Those populations rescued by outbred individuals also had increased productivity compared to those rescued by inbred individuals. Our study found that genetic rescue increased the productivity of inbred populations and was more effective utilising outbred rescuers rather than inbred rescuers.