A natural disaster sharply reduces a population's size; only a fraction of individuals survive to reproduce.
Which best describes the effect on the survivor population?
- A
Higher mutation rate in survivors
- Bcheck_circle
Reduced genetic variation due to non-representative sampling
- C
No change in allele frequencies because selection was not the cause
- D
Increased heterozygosity from inbreeding
Explanation
A bottleneck dramatically reduces population size, and the surviving alleles are essentially a random subset of the original. The result is reduced genetic variation and altered allele frequencies regardless of fitness.