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bottleneck effect in biology 1 sentence short definition, 2 short examples of it, and one short sentence using it

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Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
Definition: The bottleneck effect is a sharp reduction in population size that causes loss of genetic variation and alters allele frequencies by genetic drift.

Examples:
- Northern elephant seals were hunted down to a few dozen individuals in the 1800s, producing a bottleneck and very low genetic diversity.
- A hurricane that kills most of an island lizard population can create a bottleneck, leaving only the survivors' alleles to shape future generations.

Usage sentence: The bottleneck effect after the epidemic removed many rare alleles from the population.