Secondary impact of declining numbers Edit
Though the major cause of vaquita porpoise mortality is bycatch in gillnets, as numbers continue to dwindle, new problems will arise that will tend to make recovery more difficult. One such problem is reduced breeding rates. With fewer individuals in the habitat, less contact will occur between the sexes and consequently less reproduction. This may be followed by increased inbreeding and reduced genetic variability in the gene pool, following the bottleneck effect.
When inbreeding depression occurs, the population experiences reduced fitness because deleterious recessive genes can manifest in the population. In small populations where genetic variability is low, individuals are more genetically similar. When the genomes of mating pairs are more similar, recessive traits appear more often in offspring. The more related two individuals are in the breeding pair, the more deleterious homozygous genes the offspring will likely have which can greatly lower fitness in the offspring.[28] These secondary impacts of dwindling vaquita numbers are not necessarily a threat yet, but they will become problematic if the population continues to decline.[29]
Ecological consequences Edit