Temporal Changes in Allele Frequencies and a Population’s History of Severe Bottlenecks

Abstract

Monitoring temporal changes in genetic variation has been suggested as a means of determining if a population has experienced a demographic bottleneck. Simulations have shown that the variance in allele frequencies over time (F) can provide reasonable estimates of effective population size (Ne). This relationship between F and Ne suggests that changes in allele frequencies may provide a way to determine the severity of recent demographic bottlenecks experienced by a population. We examined allozyme variation in experimental populations of the eastern mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) to evaluate the relationship between the severity of demographic bottlenecks and temporal variation in allele frequencies. Estimates of F from both the fish populations and computer simulations were compared to expected rates of drift. We found that different methods for estimating F had little effect on the analysis. The variance in estimates of F was large among both experimental and simulated populations experiencing similar demographic bottlenecks. Temporal changes in allele frequencies suggested that the experimental populations had experienced bottlenecks, but there was no relationship between observed and expected values of F. Furthermore, genetic drift was likely to be underestimated in populations experiencing the most severe bottlenecks. The weak relationship between F and bottleneck severity is probably due to both sampling error associated with the number of polymorphic loci examined and the loss of alleles during the bottlenecks. For populations that may have experienced severe bottlenecks, caution should be used in making evolutionary interpretations or management recommendations based on temporal changes in allele frequencies.