Many species avoid inbreeding through dispersal of individuals away from their natal groups or sites. Benthic marine invertebrates with long free-living larval stages generally possess great dispersal potential and are therefore expected to have a small chance of inbreeding in the field. Species that lack such dispersive larval stages should have a higher likelihood of inbreeding. If such direc...

Inbreeding-environment interactions occur when inbreeding leads to differential fitness loss in different environments. Inbred individuals are often more sensitive to environmental stress than are outbred individuals, presumably because stress increases the expression of deleterious recessive alleles or cellular safeguards against stress are pushed beyond the organism's physiological limits. We...

The literature is full of examples of inbreeding avoidance, while recent mathematical models predict that inbreeding tolerance or even inbreeding preference should be expected under several realistic conditions like e.g. polygyny. We investigated male and female mate preferences with respect to relatedness in the fruit fly D. melanogaster. Experiments offered the choice between a first order re...

AST and JONES (1919) and CASTLE (1930) reviewed the significant experiE ments with plants and laboratory animals that contributed to the formulation of the modern viewpoints concerning the effects of inbreeding. The phenomena associated with inbreeding: decline in vigor, increased uniformity within the inbred stock, increased prepotency in outside crosses, isolation of abnormal types, etc., wer...

Understanding the fitness consequences of inbreeding (inbreeding depression) is of importance to evolutionary and conservation biology. There is ample evidence for inbreeding depression in captivity, and data from wild populations are accumulating. However, we still lack a good quantitative understanding of inbreeding depression and what influences its magnitude in natural populations. Specific...

One key objective in evolutionary ecology is to understand the magnitude of inbreeding depression expressed across sex-specific components of fitness. One major component of male fitness is fertilization success, which depends on male gametic performance (sperm and pollen performance in animals and plants, respectively). Inbreeding depression in male gametic performance could create sex-specifi...

Inbreeding depression is assumed to be a central factor contributing to the stability of plant mating systems. Predicting the fitness consequence of inbreeding in natural populations is complicated, however, because it may be affected by the mating histories of populations generating variation in the amount of purging of deleterious alleles. Furthermore, the level of inbreeding depression may d...

Animals most related or least related to current members of their breed were revealed by calculating the expected inbreeding of their future progeny. A sample of potential mates was chosen by randomly selecting 600 females from a recent birth year (1995). Relationships among the sample were computed by the tabular method. Relationships of other animals to the sample population were computed qui...

Inbreeding coefficients are calculated routinely for all animals included in national genetic evaluations for yield traits. The base population for inbreeding is defined as animals born during 1960. Animals with unknown parents are assumed to have inbreeding coefficients that are equal to the mean of coefficients for animals with known parents born during the same year. Mean inbreeding coeffici...

Inbreeding depression is the reduction in fitness in offspring resulting from mating individuals that share at least one common ancestor. The objective was to compare the effect of genome-wide and location specific homozygosity on fertility and milk production traits in dairy cattle. Pedigree inbreeding was compared with genomic inbreeding which is the realised proportion of the genome that is ...