Blackwell Publishing

Founder effect

A small population of insects on an island are predominantly colored yellow, and only a few are red.

A freak storm destroys most of the insects indiscriminately. This puts the population through a bottleneck.

Just by chance, a high proportion of the survivors happen to have the allele for red coloring with the result that when the population size recovers, it is mainly composed of their red winged descendants.

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