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Date: | Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:43:10 +0000 |
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" the Kufra bees are not suffering any ill effects, caused by inbreeding"
What puzzles me is why anyone would expect them to suffer ill effects. As long as they have a large enough population to make new sex alleles as fast as statistics eliminates existing sex alleles I would not expect to see any inbreeding issues for quit a few reasons. One reason is that they are insects. Inbreeding issues are generally not much of a problem with fish, insects or most plants. We have insects in the US whose founding population was likely five or ten or perhaps even less and those insects have spread out geographically and now number in the billions with no inbreeding issues. Some tropical fish have been imported very few times yet now number in the many millions. Some of them we do not even know where they came from so could not re import if we wanted to. A big factor in not expecting much, if any, inbreeding suppression in honey bees is that drones are haploid so clean out deleterious alleles real fast by dying. Yet even in many lower life form species without this advantage inbreeding is not an issue. Inbreeding suppression is mainly a phenomena of birds and mammals. I have not heard of varroa mites getting weak due to inbreeding. Have you?
Dick
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