Does inbreeding affect the extinction risk of small populations?: predictions from <i>Drosophila</i>

Abstract A fundamental assumption underlying the importance of genetic risks within conservation biology is that inbreeding increases the extinction probability of populations. Although inbreeding has been shown to have a detrimental impact on individual fitness, its contribution to extinction is still poorly understood. We have studied the consequences of different levels of prior inbreeding for the persistence of small populations using Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. To this end, we determined the extinction rate of small vial populations differing in the level of inbreeding under both optimal and stress conditions, i.e. high temperature stress and ethanol stress. We show that inbred populations have a significantly higher short-term probability of extinction than non-inbred populations, even for low levels of inbreeding, and that the extinction probability increases with increasing inbreeding levels. In addition, we observed that the effects of inbreeding become greatly enhanced under stressful environmental conditions. More importantly, our results show that the impact of environmental stress becomes significantly greater for higher inbreeding levels, demonstrating explicitly that inbreeding and environmental stress are not independent but can act synergistically. These effects seem long lasting as the impact of prior inbreeding was still qualitatively the same after the inbred populations had been expanded to appreciable numbers and maintained as such for approximately 50 generations. Our observations have significant consequences for conservation biology.