Hybridization may aid evolutionary rescue of an endangered East African passerine.

ABSTRACT: Introgressive hybridization is a process that enables gene flow across species barriers through the backcrossing of hybrids into a parent population. This may make genetic material, potentially including relevant environmental adaptations, rapidly available in a gene pool. Consequently, it has been postulated to be an important mechanism for enabling evolutionary rescue, that is the recovery of threatened populations through rapid evolutionary adaptation to novel environments. However, predicting the likelihood of such evolutionary rescue for individual species remains challenging. Here, we use the example of Zosterops silvanus, an endangered East African highland bird species suffering from severe habitat loss and fragmentation, to investigate whether hybridization with its congene

SUBMITTER: Vedder D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9309464 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature