Inbreeding depression

Steven Hart hartsentwine.australia@gmail.com
Wed, 04 Feb 2015 21:29:55 PST
Fascinating question Travis. If ive understood it correctly.  It could be completely random within spp groups. Just like we don't know which rainforest plants will explode in populations & smother others if global warming increases for a few thousand years.. Your question could have many out comes. Lets say in an extreme example. You hypothetically take rare bulbs from a small inbred community where there is a disease evident & you gave them to 3 collectors.. A possible out come could be ~

Mr brown, has lots of other plants with lots of diseases & your bulbs perhaps breed seeds with resistance to more disease than where they came from originally.
Mrs green has no other bulbs & no diseases & her plants grow healthy, so progeny are less prone to attack in the first place.
Joe bloke has a different out come because his plants carried the original disease, but a healthy environment allowed the plants to increase in health compared to those in the wild, & build greater immune systems. 

I'm sure there would be thousands of scenarios that would change the outcome 
Steven 

Hart's Entwine
Treats 4 Dogs
Hart Nuts


On 05/02/2015, at 4:29 AM, T O <enoster@hotmail.com> wrote:

> I have been thinking a lot about growing species of "rare" bulbs from seed saved from our own plants. In nature, when the population of a given species is very small, they can succumb to inbreeding depression. I wonder if this happens in our own gardens with, say, species of Crocus that are rare in cultivation. By saving our own seed, are we in effect creating non-resistant forms of otherwise hardy and fit species? Could this explain the phenomenon of "hybrid vigor", by expanding the gene pool?
> 
> This is of course a rhetorical question, it was inspired by Ian Young's Bulb Log
> 
> -Travis Owen
> Rogue River, OR
> 
> http://amateuranthecologist.blogspot.com/
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