Question 13 • 26-27 - C - RUSD Biology in the Living Earth
The oil spill caused a sudden, large reduction in the numbers of many local populations. When a population shrinks sharply by chance, some gene variants may become more or less common simply because the surviving individuals are a random sample; this is genetic drift. Mutation introduces new gene variants, while gene flow moves variants between populations, neither of which is the main mechanism described here.
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