the rate with which a bottleneck signal is misidentified in demographically stable populations, has received little attention. Recent studies have evaluated the power of several statistical methods developed to identify bottlenecks.
Establishing whether low genetic variation is caused by a bottleneck or a constantly low effective number of individuals is important to understand a species’ ecology and evolution, and it has implications for conservation management. Demographic bottlenecks can severely reduce the genetic variation of a population or a species.
