Abstract
AbstractWe develop a stochastic model of population viability which explicitly links demography and genetics in order to examine the consequences for extinction dynamics of different levels of heritable fitness variance within a population. We particularly focus on situations in which a local small population is artificially built with individuals that were taken from several large source populations. Our results suggest that different levels of fitness variability within a population (due to partially recessive deleterious alleles rather than local adaptation) have a large influence on its viability. Moreover, the optimal level of fitness variance for maximizing population persistence is a function of the species life‐cycle. Two mechanisms with opposite effects are mainly responsible for the different patterns of extinction obtained depending on the life‐cycle, (1) purging of deleterious alleles, (2) demographic stochasticity. For high growth rate or long‐lived species, a high fitness variance decreases short‐term viability and increases long‐term viability. In contrast, for other cases, a high fitness variance increases both short‐ and long‐term viability.
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