Effective size of harvested ungulate populations

The harvest of ungulate populations is often directed against certain sex or age classes to maximize the yield in terms of biomass, number of shot animals or number of trophies. Here we examine how such directional harvest affects the effective size of the population. We parameterize an age-specific model assumed to describe the dynamics of Fennoscandian moose. Based on expressions for the demographic variance [graphic removed] for a small subpopulation of heterozygotes Aa bearing a rare neutral allele a, we use this model to calculate how different harvest strategies influence the effective size of the population, given that the population remains stable after harvest. We show that the annual genetic drift, determined by [graphic removed] , increases with decreasing harvest rate of calves and increasing sex bias in the harvest towards bulls 1 year or older. The effective population size per generation decreased with reduced harvest of calves and increased harvest of bulls 1 year or older. The magnitude of these effects depends on the age-specific pattern of variation in reproductive success, which influences the demographic variance. This shows that the choice of harvest strategy strongly affects the genetic dynamics of harvested ungulate populations.