Would inbreeding in an animal species cause a genetic death?
If an animal species had too few viable would the species never be able to recover and would the offspring of that species be weakened with too many genetic problems that it would eventually die out?
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Inbreeding can lead to an 'inbreeding depression' with reduced fitness in the population due to a temporary decrease in variability. However the genomics are showing that these reductions occur repeatedly with healthy recoveries. This is a common start in island biodiversity. Large populations do not appear intact in new habitats. At most a few breeding pairs begin.
Even humans appear to possibly have 4 such choke points. The Toba eruption may have caused a portion of the limited genetic variation in humans but was not the only population limiting event. This iterative founder effect matches analysis of artifacts found in archeology sites that follow the dispersal routes humans took.
http://www.citeulike.org/user/xosepedro/article/19...
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg...
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stanley_ambrose....
http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/paleo/bottleneck.ht...
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac...
Not necessarily. As we all seem to know, inbreeding is not a great thing because of potential recessive traits that can become magnified, but this doesn't necessarily happen all the time. It is always better to have genetic diversity in a population to avoid this, but most species at one time or another have had genetic bottlenecks. It is also a major way that speciation occurs.
In fact the cheetah is one such species that when analyzed is theorized to have had such a close bottleneck that at one point there was only one living female with offspring and now all cheetahs are decended from her. Yes, cheetah's have problems as a species due to lack of genetic diversity, but they've managed a pretty astounding rebound considering.
Dark Energy it seems suits you well. 1st off no where does it say that all the animals were descendant from man or Adam and Eve. If you read the Bible at all you will find that one of the days in the creation was spent to create all the animals and all the plants. 2nd After a flood it doesn't wipe out all live, take fo instance the floods that man endures even now it doesn't wipe out every living thing, the same is true with fire the land is rejuvenated.The food from ancient times was Dates, Olives Oil,and Nuts that last indefinitely. Lastly your observation of abnormalities and lack of genetic diversity is incorrect, to a point for many centuries there was inbreeding without any adverse affects. Not until many Millenium later with the onset of the millions of different diseases and the corruption of man with animals and perverse behaviour did changes in the Genome take place to make the inbreeding become a real issue meaning that we have corrupted ourselves. Bare in mind that we were at one time a perfect species that was not affected by sickness and old age.as we are now. I suggest you do a little more research, I think you will find that your observations are only partially true.
The situation you're describing is called a population bottleneck, and as mentioned by another respondent, cheetahs have passed through such a bottleneck. While the individual cheetahs are fit animals, the population as a whole is vulnerable. All of the animals in the population have similar weaknesses to disease and illness, and consequently, it would be possible for the entire species to be wiped out by a new disease to which there were no resistant individuals.
Possibly. That's close to what happened, looking at the genetics, to cheetahs. There were very few individuals which ended up creating a 'genetic bottleneck'. They obviously did survive this, however, their lack of genetic diversity puts them at serious risk for future changes. Diverse genetics is what puts species in a good position to overcome challenges and changes to their environment. I'm sure some species have encountered just this type of end.
It could leave them vulnerable to disease since they would all likely have the same susceptibility. The other problems could likely be resolved by natural selection but diseases are much more likely to devastate a genetically compressed species.