Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Levell, Samantha

Area of Concentration

Animal Wellbeing and Conservation

Abstract

Inbreeding, the mating of closely related individuals, can affect the fitness and overall health of natural populations by reducing genetic diversity and exposing deleterious recessive alleles. To better understand the effects of inbreeding, a controlled lab experiment was conducted using the Least Killifish species, Heterandria Formosa. Many species have evolved behavioral and demographic mechanisms to avoid inbreeding; however, these mechanisms can be constrained in small or structured populations. This species was purposely chosen for this experiment as the fish appear in two diverse populations; a population with high density from the Wacissa River (WR) located in South-Central Jefferson county, Florida and a population with low density from a Trout Pond (TP) located in Leon county, Florida. This study aimed to evaluate how population structures and demographic histories influence inbreeding outcomes across contrasting ecological contexts. We hypothesize that our results will indicate a higher tolerance to inbreeding from the Trout Pond population with no significant decrease in litter size or in offspring mass. In contrast, we predict that individuals from the Wacissa River population will experience significant loss in litter size and reductions in overall offspring mass as a result of inbreeding. The findings from this study will contribute to a broader understanding of how inbreeding effects vary across populations with distinct ecological and demographic histories.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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