After modeling two reserves after the example C, I wanted to increase the heterozygosity, while increasing the number of runs without a lost of alleles. The best way to do that was to increase the size of the individual populations. I went from four to three habitats to achieve this and was successful in my goal. As you can see in the table above, the heterozygosity went up from 0.18 to 0.23, and there was one run more than the Reserve C that did not lose an allele. Out of 20 runs, this is very impressive. This makes Reserve 1 the “best” fit reserve for the population of ferrets and will promote the success of more and more generations. In comparison to reserves A and B, Reserve 1 is much more successful. It is clear that the best reserve uses parts of each example to achieve a better grouping of habitats. In Reserve A, the size of the population was a successful way to promote the movement of genes through a population, however it reached fixation many times. In Reserve B, the generation of ferrets was represented in 4 separate habitats. This was not very successful as the habitats heterozygosity was minimized and fixation was reached very fast with such small populations. However, the idea to promote different alleles by separating the generation gave inspiration for genetic drift in Reserve C. As explained before, this reserve gave inspiration to both custom reserves, but itself was not successful enough because the distribution of populations was still too small. To avoid sampling error from small populations, and to still achieve the flow of diversity throughout the populations, Reserve 1 was the best model to save the ferrets with successful genetic drift.
Recent comments