Allozyme heterozygosity and fluctuating asymmetry in brown hares Lepus europaeus introduced to New Zealand: Developmental homeostasis in populations with a bottleneck history

The effect of genetic variability as indicated by allozyme heterozygosity on developmental homeostasis as expressed by fluctuating morphological asymmetry (FA) is under current debate. Recent studies of brown hares Lepus europaeus Pallas, 1778 in Austria (Hartl et al. 1995) revealed a negative relationship between FA and allozyme heterozygosity in non-metric but not in metric skull characters. Authors aimed to find out whether non-metric traits of brown hares are generally more prone to FA than metric, or whether metric traits also show increased FA in populations with drastically reduced genetic variability. Authors studied variation in 34 enzyme systems and the relationship between overall individual heterozygosity based on polymorphic loci and FA in 27 non-metric and six metric bilateral skull characters of 96 brown hares from three populations in Britain and two in New Zealand. The effect of genetic variability as indicated by allozyme heterozygosity on developmental homeostasis as expressed by fluctuating morphological asymmetry (FA) is under current debate. Recent studies of brown hares Lepus europaeus Pallas, 1778 in Austria (Hartl et al. 1995) revealed a negative relationship between FA and allozyme heterozygosity in non-metric but not in metric skull characters. Authors aimed to find out whether non-metric traits of brown hares are generally more prone to FA than metric, or whether metric traits also show increased FA in populations with drastically reduced genetic variability. Authors studied variation in 34 enzyme systems and the relationship between overall individual heterozygosity based on polymorphic loci and FA in 27 non-metric and six metric bilateral skull characters of 96 brown hares from three populations in Britain and two in New Zealand.