Biologists who released lizards on tiny uninhabited islands in the Bahamas have uncovered a seldom-observed interaction between evolutionary processes. They found that the lizards' genetic and morphological (form and structural) traits were determined by both natural selection and a phenomenon called the founder effect.
The founder effect is the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population. It often results in the new population becoming genetically or morphologically different from the original population.
