Bottleneck Effect

Real World Example

Imagine you're trying to make soup for a large family gathering, but suddenly half of your ingredients go bad, leaving you with only a few items to work with. This situation is similar to the bottleneck effect in genetics, where a population experiences a sharp decline in numbers, reducing the variety of genetic "ingredients" available. Just as your soup's flavor becomes limited with fewer ingredients, a population's genetic diversity is restricted when only a small number of individuals survive to pass on their genes, narrowing the potential for variation in future generations.