Projects per year
Abstract
Experimental studies often find that inbreeding depression is more severe in harsh environments, but the few studies of in situ wild populations available to date rarely find strong support for this effect. We investigated evidence for inbreeding depression by environment interactions in nine traits in the individually-monitored Soay sheep population of St Kilda, using genomic inbreeding coefficients based on 37,037 SNP loci, and population density as an axis of environmental variation. All traits showed variation with population density and all traits showed some evidence for depression due to either an individual’s own inbreeding or maternal inbreeding. However, only six traits showed evidence for an interaction in the expected direction, and only two interactions were statistically significant. We identify three possible reasons why wild population studies may generally fail to find strong support for interactions between inbreeding depression and environmental variation compared with experimental studies. First, for species with biparental inbreeding only, the amount of observed inbreeding in natural populations is generally low compared with that used in experimental studies. Second, it is possible that experimental studies sometimes actually impose higher levels of stress than organisms experience in the wild. Third, some purging of the deleterious recessive alleles that underpin interaction effects may occur in the wild.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 64-77 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Heredity |
Volume | 118 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 23 Nov 2016 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- Inbreeding
- SNP
- density
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Dive into the research topics of 'Inbreeding depression by environment interactions in a free-living mammal population'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 2 Finished
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Genomic prediction in a wild mammal
Pemberton, J. (Principal Investigator)
30/04/15 → 29/04/18
Project: Research
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WEG: Wild Evolutionary Genomics
Pemberton, J. (Principal Investigator)
1/09/10 → 31/08/16
Project: Research
Datasets
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Data from: Inbreeding depression by environment interactions in a free-living mammal population
Pemberton, J. M. (Creator), Ellis, P. E. (Creator), Pilkington, J. G. (Creator) & Bérénos, C. (Creator), Dryad, 6 Sept 2016
DOI: 10.5061/dryad.8v010, http://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.8v010
Dataset
Profiles
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Josephine Pemberton
- School of Biological Sciences - Chair of Natural History
Person: Academic: Research Active