Evidence of the phenotypic expression of a lethal recessive allele under inbreeding in a wild population of conservation concern
Acknowledgements We thank everyone who helped with fieldwork, particularly Sue Bignal for her ongoing efforts on Islay, and David Jardine, Mike Peacock and Neil Metcalfe for providing information from Colonsay. We thank all landowners and farmers who allowed access to nest sites. We thank Scottish Natural Heritage, and particularly Rae McKenzie, for their ongoing support, and thank the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for their generous logistical support for AET and JMR. We thank Tom Pennycott and John Mould for undertaking veterinary post-mortems of blind nestlings, and Islay Veterinary Surgery for their help. AET was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and Scottish Natural Heritage, JMR was funded by the Royal Society, and DMcC was funded by the Scottish Government Rural Affairs & Environment Portfolio Strategic Research Programme 2011–2016, Theme 1: Ecosystem Services & Biodiversity. Data accessibility Data on occurrences of blindness in affected families are available in the Supporting Information. All other data associated with this article are available at the Dryad Digital Repository http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.57t89 (Trask et al. 2016). ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF