{"id":2051182,"date":"2019-05-02T19:41:56","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T23:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=2051182"},"modified":"2019-05-02T11:42:22","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T15:42:22","slug":"narwhals-genetic-diversity-survival-2051182-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/narwhals-genetic-diversity-survival-2051182-2\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s a mystery how narwhals have survived"},"content":{"rendered":"
A narwhal discovery challenges the idea that genetic diversity is necessary for a species to survive.<\/p>\n
Researchers at the Natural History Museum of Denmark sequenced the genome of a narwhal from West Greenland, and opened a window to the past million years of its evolutionary history.<\/p>\n
The findings suggest that narwhals have had consistently low genetic diversity throughout the entire period but have nevertheless survived through to the present day.<\/p>\n
“The narwhal has incredibly low genetic variation across its genome compared to other mammals, both in and beyond the Arctic,” says Eline Lorenzen, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the study in Cell<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n