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Blog 5: Inbreeding

 Inbreeding is a common form of non-random mating that has both benefits and costs.

One form of inbreeding is self-fertilization, which is commonly seen in plants. A single plant in possession of both male and female parts fertilizes itself. A benefit of this is that one individual can reproduce and populate an area by itself. However, there will not be any genetic variation which can be detrimental as the plant population won't be able to adapt well to environmental changes with such a limited gene pool. 

Inbreeding can also just be mating between related individuals. A benefit of this is to possibly keep advantageous alleles in your family by only mating with individuals who also possess those alleles. A cost of inbreeding is that it causes a decreases in heterozygosity over time. This can be detrimental to the fitness of the population because it increases the likelihood of an individual being homozygous for recessive deleterious alleles. This results in negative fitness consequences for the individual and the population. Therefore, inbreeding is often selected against due to its high reproductive costs.

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