Bottleneck Effect

The bottleneck effect occurs when a population is suddenly

reduced in numbers to a small size.
This typically occurs in one of two ways:
A catastrophic environmental event (e.g. flood, fire, drought,
landslide) which indiscriminately removes individuals regardless
of their genetic makeup
Human action (e.g. habitat destruction, introduction of
predators) which also removes individuals.
As a result of population numbers falling, it is likely that the range
of alleles in the bottle neck population will decrease and the
frequencies of alleles in the resulting population will change.

The starting
population includes
3 phenotypes of
frogs: yellow, dark
green and striped

A drought causes a
bottleneck in which
the population size
is decreased and
the dark green
phenotype is lost.

The population size

recovers but genetic
variation is decreased
and only 2
phenotypes are left.