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The article mentions that captive axolotls are in bad shape due to severe inbreeding.
by wanderr 8y ago
The article mentions that captive axolotls are in bad shape due to severe inbreeding.
- userbinator 8y agoIt mentions an inbreeding coefficient of 35 (or 0.35 in the fractional scale), which although high, is not unusual; a quick search reveals https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21076095 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21076095 where some lines of domesticated chickens go as high as 61.
- vanderZwan 8y agoI don't think that taking the most used and cheapest of our three main food-producing domesticated animals is a good data point to decide what is and isn't "unusual" in this context. Given that it is an animal whose relationship to humans includes the most extreme of exploitations, meaning trade-off to push this to extremes to get a specific benefit is more extreme than anywhere else[0], it likely represents the most extreme outlier. This is a very different context than the health of wild/pet axolotls. [0] Well, short of lab animals who have been deliberately inbred to effectively be clones. But that kind of breaks the purpose of this coefficient by definition.