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Population bottleneck followed by recovery or extinction. A population bottleneck or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events such as famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, and droughts; or human activities such as genocide, speciocide, widespread violence or intentional culling.
Demographic stochasticity is often only a driving force toward extinction in populations with fewer than 50 individuals. Random events influence the fecundity and survival of individuals in a population, and in larger populations, these events tend to stabilize toward a steady growth rate. However, in small populations there is much more ...
Dresbachian extinction event: 502 Ma: End-Botomian extinction event: 517 Ma: Precambrian: End-Ediacaran extinction: 542 Ma: Anoxic event [45] Great Oxygenation Event: 2400 Ma: Rising oxygen levels in the atmosphere due to the development of photosynthesis as well as possible Snowball Earth event. (see: Huronian glaciation.)
These events can include rapid loss of population size due to disease, natural disasters, and climate change. Habitat loss and/or habitat degradation can also kick start an extinction vortex. Other factors include events that occur more gradually, such over-harvesting (hunting, fishing, etc.), or excessive predation.
The most famous of these mass extinction events — when an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, dooming the dinosaurs and many other species — is also the most recent. But ...
Luis Walter Alvarez, left, and his son Walter, right, at the K–T Boundary in Gubbio, Italy, 1981. The Alvarez hypothesis posits that the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and many other living things during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event was caused by the impact of a large asteroid on the Earth.
In conservation biology, latent extinction risk is a measure of the potential for a species to become threatened.. Latent risk can most easily be described as the difference, or discrepancy, between the current observed extinction risk of a species (typically as quantified by the IUCN Red List) and the theoretical extinction risk of a species predicted by its biological or life history ...
The environment can directly affect the survival of a small population. Some detrimental effects include stochastic variation in the environment (year to year variation in rainfall, temperature), which can produce temporally correlated birth and death rates (i.e. 'good' years when birth rates are high and death rates are low and 'bad' years when birth rates are low and death rates are high ...