Promoter: Raoul Van Damme
Supervision: Lisa Van Linden
Subject: During island colonization, populations experience a reduction in genetic diversity as a result of founder effects and inbreeding, and thereafter through genetic drift. Consequently, island populations often have lower genetic variation compared to their mainland counterparts – they are inbred. This “genetic stress” can negatively affect individuals’ phenotypes and performance and thus also compromise their fitness. In natural island populations, it is often very difficult to disentangle genetic effects on individuals’ fitness from environmental effects, because islands can differ a lot from the mainland. To properly understand the effects of inbreeding on fitness, one would need to compare populations that have developed in identical environments.
In this individual project, you will measure and compare three ecologically relevant variables (growth rate, symmetry, bite force) between island and mainland populations to study the effect of inbreeding on fitness. For this, you will use a unique set of lizards from a common garden set-up (FELASA certificate is required).
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