Hedrick Philip W, Gadau Jürgen, Page Robert E
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2006 Feb;21(2):55-7. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2005.11.014. Epub 2005 Dec 13.
Genetic factors can affect the probability of extinction either by increasing the effect of detrimental variants or by decreasing the potential for future adaptive responses. In a recent paper, Zayed and Packer demonstrate that low variation at a specific locus, the complementary sex determination (csd) locus in Hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps), can result in a sharply increased probability of extinction. Their findings illustrate situations in which there is a feedback process between decreased genetic variation at the csd locus owing to genetic drift and decreased population growth, resulting in an extreme type of extinction vortex for these ecologically important organisms.
遗传因素可通过增强有害变异的影响或降低未来适应性反应的潜力来影响灭绝的可能性。在最近的一篇论文中，扎耶德和帕克证明，膜翅目（蚂蚁、蜜蜂和黄蜂）中一个特定基因座——互补性性别决定（csd）基因座的低变异，会导致灭绝概率急剧增加。他们的研究结果说明了这样的情况：由于遗传漂变，csd基因座的遗传变异减少与种群增长下降之间存在一个反馈过程，从而导致这些具有重要生态意义的生物出现一种极端类型的灭绝漩涡。
