Heritability of body size in polar bears

What is it about?

Heritability is a key concept in evolutionary biology, which indicates the proportion of variation in a trait that is caused by additive genetic effects. ("Additive genetic effects" result directly from different individuals having different versions of genes, and do not include effects from dominance or from interactions between different genes.) In the case of polar bears, we found that heritability of body size was typical of a wild mammal. We also calculated evolvability, which measures how a trait will respond proportionally to natural selection. We found that evolvability was lower than is typical for wild mammals, indicating that any evolutionary response to selection may be slower than we would have expected.

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Why is it important?

This paper provides the first estimate of heritability and evolvability in polar bears.