Related topics: population

Geneticists map the rhinoceros family tree

There's been an age-old question going back to Darwin's time about the relationships among the world's five living rhinoceros species. One reason answers have been hard to come by is that most rhinos went extinct before the ...

Human impacts erode behavioral diversity in chimpanzees

Compared to other animals, chimpanzees show tremendous variation across groups in their behavior—from the types of tools they use in their feeding behavior to the specific gestures they use in communication. Research in ...

Buried Coins Key to Roman Population Mystery?

(PhysOrg.com) -- The first century BC in Italy was culturally a brilliant age, unequaled by any other period in Roman history. It was a time of Cicero, Caesar, Vergil, Horace and many other major literary figures of the Antiquity.

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Population size

In population genetics and population ecology, population size (usually denoted N) is the number of individual organisms in a population.

The effective population size (Ne) is defined as "the number of breeding individuals in an idealized population that would show the same amount of dispersion of allele frequencies under random genetic drift or the same amount of inbreeding as the population under consideration." Ne is usually less than N (the absolute population size) and this has important applications in conservation genetics.

Small population size results in increased genetic drift. Population bottlenecks are when population size reduces for a short period of time.

Overpopulation may indicate any case in which the population of any species of animal may exceed the carrying capacity of its ecological niche.

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