In a story in Discovery News online, scientists say habitat loss related to development and logging, as well as the encroachment of barred owls from the north, have likely combined to depress the Northern Spotted Owl’s population to the point of creating a genetic bottleneck.
And that can lead to inbreeding. Or loss. Says Robert Fleischer, an evolutionary and conservation geneticist at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington D.C:
It’s a species that a lot of people like and enjoy. It’s hard to put a value on something like that, but it would be a far less rich experience to have Pacific Northwest woods that were lacking spotted owls.
Well, but heck: Humans went through a bottleneck way back when, and we made it out the other end just fine — grew big and strong, built houses, shifted the other species’ lives around…. Go on, wags, say something now about inbreeding.
Not to make too light of it, of course.
This article appears in Two if by sea.
In AZ we heard a quail cross. Scaled quail x Gambel’s quail = Scrambeled quail. No joke.
funny how all the scientists quoted don’t live around here. I am interested, is this based on actual genetic testing or are they looking at some database and playing statistics? probably the latter if done from Colorado.
sorry, all those commercials confused me……cascade populations..
The environmental concern isn’t "bottle necks", its extinction.
Extinction is alot more likely when a population is decreasing rapidly and its numbers are close to where normal mortality has a good chance to result in extinction.
Maybe the small numbers of spotted owls will result in the entire species undergoing rapid genetic drift and changing their traits, like nesting somewhere besides old growth snags. Thats or extinction is what the advocates of clear cutting are hoping for.
I’d say that Humboldt’s population has been prety small and isolated and the locally born here show the effects of genetic drift in a reduced ability to reasona and think.