Question

The Chinese Alligator (Alligator sinensis; above) is a critically endangered species living in a restricted reserve area in the Yangtze River in China’s Anhui province. (Captive populations are doing much better; where individuals may live up to 70 years).

a. (2 pts) If, during four consecutive years the population was sampled and its population size was 200, 100, 50 and 10, what is the effective population size (N_e) of this population? Show your work.

Answer 1

effective population size is the harmonic mean of the population sizes

So,