Consider two populations with equal census populations Popul

Consider two populations with equal census populations. Population 1 has high individual variance in reproductive successes, while population 2 has lower individual variance in reproductive sucess. All else being equal, the Ne (effective population) of population 1 will be ...?

Answer: lower than Ne of population 2 and less than census population size. But I don\'t understand why?

Solution

Vinod that the higher the variance in reproductive success among individuals the lower is the effective population.

Ne=N/V

where Ne= effective population size

N =the population size and V is the variance in reproductive success.

The census population size of a real population is usually larger than the effective population.

The discussion can be made more clear relating to effective population size which indictates whether the population can maintain sufficient genetic variance and can give proper responses to the environmental changes.

The census population is related to the number of individual organisms in a population the smaller the size of population greater will be the genetic drift. Ne is usually less than the absolute population size(N) and it has greater applications in conservation genetics