The effect of a population bottleneck on the evolution of genetic variance/covariance structure.

It is well known that standard population genetic theory predicts decreased additive genetic variance (V(a) ) following a population bottleneck and that theoretical models including interallelic and intergenic interactions indicate such loss may be avoided. However, few empirical data from multicellular model systems are available, especially regarding variance/covariance (V/CV) relationships. Here, we compare the V/CV structure of seventeen traits related to body size and composition between control (60 mating pairs/generation) and bottlenecked (2 mating pairs/generation; average F = 0.