Wild Deer Culling Research pt.3 - The Nuts & Bolts of Antler Genetics

Do big bucks always have big antlered offspring? How much of a buck's antler size is affected by his sire? Are spikes genetically inferior? We're diving deep into antler heritability, buck breeding values, and antler genetics in this third and final buck culling podcast. Dr. Randy DeYoung of the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Kingsville is joining us and sharing lot's of information about buck antler genetics and how many variables around genetics affect culling efficacy.

Transcript

Intro, Event Announcement & Recap

Moriah Boggess 0:01

Welcome to Wildlife Investments, where we discuss wildlife research, habitat, hunting, and land management with our panel of leading resource managers. Wildlife Investments, resource management by scientists. Thanks for tuning in for the third and final episode of the Deer Culling Research Series. Before we get going, I just want to mention this is your last chance to get tickets for the Deer Management Academy in Raymond, Mississippi, August 29th. This episode goes live on the 12th, and that means there's two or three days left to purchase tickets. We would love to see you there. It's going to be an intensive day in a classroom. We're going to cover everything from the basics of deer biology through population monitoring, through habitat management, and the like. Go to our website, wildlifeinvestments.com, click on the education events tab, and you can see more information and purchase tickets there. We hope to see you in a few weeks.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:04

All right. Welcome back to the Wildlife Investments Podcast. And this is our third and final episode on the topic of culling. And we're going through a very long series of studies, probably right at 20 years of studies that were done in South Texas. And if you recall, episode one was what was called the King Ranch study, and that we interviewed Mick Hellikson, and he told us about that and the things that worked, a lot of the things that didn't work, and why, most notably the lack of control and dispersal of bucks and deer from different treatments. We then moved to phase two called the Comanche study, and for that we interviewed Donnie Drager and he told us about some differences there, working with enclosed populations, being more efficient with buck selection, in other words, using a helicopter to capture bucks, age them, and then make the culling decision, versus on the King Ranch, it was with a guide and a rifle and using hunters. And the bottom line, if you haven't listened to those, was that it didn't work. And so there was there was no meaningful change in buck antler size through that. So we we weren't able to we could affect the the phenotype in the the short term by sculpting a cohort and removing lower quality bucks and changing the average antler size of a cohort in real time. But then when you looked at the offspring that were being produced, there was no change. So meaning we weren't influencing

Welcome & Guest Introduction — Dr. Randy DeYoung

Dr. Bronson Strickland 2:49

the genotype. And so using all this fancy terminology like phenotype and genotype, we actually have someone that's qualified today to define those terms and educate us and bring us up to speed and kind of putting it all together on why these calling experiments didn't work. So we are joined by Dr. Randy DeYoung. He is a professor at the Caesar Clayburgh Wildlife Research Institute at Texas AM University Kingsville. That's a mouthful, Randy. But thank you for joining us. And Randy, I gotta say, dang if you ain't looking old.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 3:30

Well, Bronson, uh as you said, that uh these studies go on for 20 odd years. This is what it does to you.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 3:37

You looked a lot younger 20 years ago when we started all this. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 3:42

I was just thinking the other day as I was renewing my passport, I should sue the university. Look what this place has done to me.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 3:55

Uh treatments from a dermatologist to burn off places that that aren't functioning on my head anymore. So I'm just joking. But Randy, seriously, we we want to get some insight from you on the things that maybe most people don't consider. So concurrently going on with this, you were able genetically to measure things that in your typical just hunting and culling and harvest removal, you can't measure. So things like heritability. How important is that heritability estimate? Things like breeding value, which I compliment you years ago, you really started talking about that metric and how important it is. And so would just love for you to kind of discuss some some of these factors, maybe define them better than Donnie or Mick or I could could ever do. And just help people understand that it's not only just the dispersal mechanism, it's not just the deficiency potentially of removing enough of these bucks. Biologically, genetically, you've got these other issues you have to contend with that make this effort really inefficient.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 5:08

Yeah, one thing

Antler Genetics 101

Dr. Randy DeYoung 5:10

we were able to do just because of, you know, the the amount of efficiency, you know, using helicopters and capture and recapturing a lot of these deer, we were able to get not only their antler measurements and age, but you know, tissue samples from which we can extract DNA. Now, we don't know what goes into building antlers. It's probably, you know, if there's kind of a parallel, I usually think of it as something probably like like height in in people. You know, we we kind of know that tall parents tend to have tall kids, but there's not just one gene for height. There's probably a hundred or maybe a couple hundred, each which contribute a little bit. And then there's a lot of ways to be tall. You can have long legs, you can have a long torso, you can have a little bit of both. Adlers is probably something like that. So we don't know exactly what genes are going in there, but it's probably a hundred or maybe a couple hundred, each contributing a little bit. And so what we can do though is we can use that DNA to identify relatives because we know that animals that are related to each other, they share the same genetic material, they ought to look very similar. And they do, you know, so what we can do is you know, identify parent offspring, you know, s from from you know, the bucks, what do their sons look like, and then what do their sons look like, and so on. And so using that information, then we can use you know, make some I guess you know, try to quantify what the this genetic component is. Because you can think of it that there's like a there's a an overall like underlying potential that every individual has. Whether or not he re re reaches that potential is determined by a lot of other things, you know, that are not genetic, you know, they're environmental or other. You know, kind of like you, Bronson, you may have had good potential, but we see how you turned out.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 7:14

Far from fulfilling the potential, yeah.

Genetics vs. Environment

Dr. Randy DeYoung 7:18

So, you know, think of it as there's this potential, and then there's what we actually see on the ground, you know, as the phenotype, you know, the antler size there, which is influenced by a whole lot of things, you know, nutrition age, obviously, you know, older mature bucks are going to be able to, you know, put more resources toward growing antlers and so on. So we have the genetic component, and then we have you know, nutrition, age, and a bunch of other, you know, environmental type of things. You know, how healthy is that animal? Has he been injured or sick or something like that? So altogether, the the genetic component of that is what we call heritability. You know, and then the rest of it is, you know, some of these other pieces we can we can estimate, some of them we can't. Some of them it just kind of goes into a catch-all like this is environmental, you know. We don't know if that's drought or you know food or what, but it's environmental of some kind.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 8:21

So if you had the same species of critter and and you had a controlled, confined, controlled versus free range, by default, if you can control some of these things like they constantly have a good diet, we can control for disease, etc. etc., and that that controlled group, their the heritability for the exact same trait in the wild population would be greater.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 8:47

Yeah. Because the controls are environmental. Because you're you're tamping down all that environmental variation, that means that the genetics can explain a bigger part, you know, of of what we see, of, you know, antler size specifically. So, you know, we can have different populations that have somewhat different heritability, and it may not be necessarily that the genetic component is all that different, but it may be that the environmental portion is different. Now, that's this is really something to keep in mind because you know I think the genetic part has really gotten, you know, people get enamored with it. You know, obviously, you know, we see what's what's possible with captive deer. We also have a lot of examples from livestock where, you know, we've used selection and and so on, you know, these genetic improvements, and we think, well, cow, we ought to be able to do that in deer. And, you know, if we could do that and kind of improve things, then you know, we could get bigger antlers and get them at younger ages and and so on. But focusing so much on that genetic part kind of leaves out this whole big environmental part. And that's something that, you know, as as as we found out, it takes a long time to do anything with the genetics because you got to wait till animals grow up. And if it takes, you know, the average age of all the bucks that are breeding is five to seven years old of age, then that's how long it takes to see even one generation. You know, the genetics doesn't happen overnight. It takes a while. But

Why Nutrition Outperforms Genetics

Dr. Randy DeYoung 10:28

I can start putting out some better nutrition, maybe supplemental food, maybe other kind of plannings, and I can have a management effect almost immediately or within a year or two, you know. And so, you know, it's kind of a, you know, how much can we get through any kind of genetic manipulation versus how much could we get through nutritional manipulation? And, you know, I think in a lot of cases, what we've found is that the nutritional part is a lot, a lot more achievable, you know, especially with, you know, with with free-ranging or even even high-fenced animals, you know, you just don't have enough control over the breeding part to make a big difference unless you put a huge amount of resources into it. And then it's just so it's so costly and unwieldy, you might as well just build a captive deer pens and do it there. You know, I mean it's it just begets to be too, you know, too, too much input to to be ever be worth it from the genetic part.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 11:30

Yeah. Okay, so let's start with with heritability. And so that is gonna be a, I guess, probably a site-specific population level number.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 11:43

It is, but uh with with a caveat on that in that a lot of the the there haven't been very many studies that have done heritability for whitetailed deer, but there's been, you know, and and several of those are in captive deer herds, but there's been other species of of deer, you know, red deer and and so on. And it is kind of interesting that the heritability estimates are not all that different for antler traits. So while in in in principle they could differ, in practice they don't seem to differ quite as much as we thought they might. So just but you're right that if you're in a you know a controlled environment in a captive facility or something, you you potentially have a lot more control over that environmental part. But in practice, we don't always see a big difference. Yeah.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 12:34

Yeah. So so what would be, well, like from the Comanche study, what were some of those heritability values?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 12:41

So the the you know, what what kind of coming back into like doing some of the like culling or selective harvest, you know, as I was referring, you you've got to get those fawns into the next generation to make any kind of genetic change. And so the sooner you could get those bucks to into the breeding population and make your selection decisions, you can, if you could shorten that generation time, you can make faster progress, right? So, I mean, you know, if we could select antler traits based on yearling bucks, and that was a really reliable signal of their genetic quality, that's the fastest progress you could make. Right? But two things here. One, how reliable is their yearling antler set as a predictor, and then two, do they able to compete for breeding when there's other wild bucks around? And on both cases, we find one that the yearling antler set is not a very good predictor of their potential. And when there's mature bucks around, they don't breed very much. So, you know, it's kind of a it it's just not very efficient. Now, in a captive setting, you could you could accomplish that, you know, but again, I think the the weak part being that the the yearling antler size may not be a very good predictor of what their their genetic quality is, and you kind of have to get them at you know three or four or five years of of age to really get a good idea of what they're what they're you know, how how reliable their antler sets are. So please correct me if I'm misremembering or my logic is completely wrong here. So when you mentioned that about selection at the yearling age class, it it brought

Heritability Estimates from the Comanche Ranch Study

Dr. Randy DeYoung 14:35

up the the Texas Parks and Wildlife, Mitch Lockwood, and other authors, but I think he was the lead author. And I think they were only selecting at the at the yearling age class, and so they could move really, really quick by doing that. But so so they were able to move quick and go through eight, nine, or ten generations and eight, nine or ten years of selection, but you don't really know what those bucks would have turned out to be at maturity. So they were really good yearlings, and the selection worked to produce more very good yearlings, and we assume they would be larger than average mature bucks, but we but we don't know. Yeah. Yeah, probably so. And you know, they didn't report on some of the the mature antler metrics, but probably they were, you know, on the average, you know, the yeah, even though it in in the in the in the wild studies, the antler size was not a very good predictor, but in the captive studies, it was a lot better. And so you're right, in that they were able to produce in eight years, they're able to produce four generations, you know, because they get a you know, a fawn born that has to grow up to be a year and a half to be able to breed, so that's about a two-year interval, you know, until you can get another generation in there. So, you know, during an eight-year period, they were able to go through four generations and improve, you know, some of the the antler metrics. But, you know, if we take a step back, what they were doing was they had, you know, one buck breeding them to maybe 12 or 15 or maybe more doughs. And then out of all of those buck fawns, picking the best one of those to go into the next generation, and then doing that, you know, several times. And so you have multiple bucks that you're doing this with, and then you can out of all of those, you know, dozens of buck fawns, you can pick the best one or two to be your next generation, right?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 16:38

Yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 16:39

Because guess what? They're not all gonna be big antlers. There's gonna be kind of, you know, you you're hoping that they're gonna be on the average, that they're gonna be above average. But that's just the average, because there's gonna be some that aren't very big, and there's gonna be some that are real big, and some that are just kind of in the middle. And what you want is the best of the best at each at each level, right? So I think the the the one, the the control over breeding, being able to produce that many buck fawns from your handful of desirable breeding bucks, and then two, being able to have a hundred percent control over breeding. You know, the there's no competition, there's no other bucks breeding, and so on. We move outside of that captive situation and we've lost all of that. And the other thing, too, is looking back in and you know, taking in, you know, some of the I guess previous ways of of analyzing some of the the those captive results, too, one of which was Steve Lukefar, who with Harry Jacobson, you know, they they were studying some of the heritability in the in the Mississippi State captive deer herd, you know, about the same time that that some of the initial curr results were being published. You know, it turns out that there was, you know, there were some at least one really big antlered sire in the curr that was used quite a bit. And so, you know, he appears multiple times on both sides of the pedigree. And so, you know, you get an average relationship of about close to first cousins between a bunch of those deer that were used in some of those experiments. And so they may have had a situation where those yearling antlers were a lot more reliable because of that. You know, they're they're not starting with some wild deer from scratch. You know, they've had a a number of generations of background already, you know, in there. Now, I don't know that for sure, but it seems like their reliability of the yearling antler traits is something that we don't see in the wild deer, you know, and and I think it's real. I mean, they're they're they're they did some very good work in their reporting of what they observed. You know, just the question was how well would this translate to to you know working with wild deer, you know, starting from scratch. And you know, it took a a number of studies and a number of deals, but and a number, you know, a lot of effort. But what we see is at least in some of these, you know, more arid regions of of South Texas, that you know, the environment is so important and you can do a lot to counteract that with supplemental feed, but still, especially for one and two-year-old deer, their amateurs are not a very good predictor of what they're gonna be later in life.

Moriah Boggess 19:33

So, in like in the Kerr study and all, in that controlled environment in the pen, there's obviously heavy supplemental feeding that's dampening that environmental effect year to year. But is there also you mentioned them breeding a buck to like 12 different does. Where because of that confined area, do they have a more constrained breeding window and maybe fewer late-born, yeah, late-born fawns, late-bred does as a result of just how those herds are managed?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 20:02

Yeah. Maybe older, but sometimes it it might be that you know, not if there's too many does in there, especially with the yearling buck, he might not be able to breed them all. You know, so there it could actually be a handful that are late. But even if you do have, you know, some that are late-born, you know, since you have 100% control on the breeding, you're not gonna, and if they don't turn out to have good yearling outler characteristics, they're not ever gonna be part of the breeding pool, like ever, you know. Because again, you're making all the control over over the over the breeding in in in those conditions. And so once we step outside of that, we lose all of that. And it turns out that, you know, even if you cull really heavily, you were kind of thinking, well, we're gonna give a lot of these individual bucks, even young bucks are gonna have a better chance to breed. But that's not necessarily what we see. And even so, the number of fawns that they can put on the ground is fairly limited, you know, in a when they've got to compete with other bucks, because, you know, white-tailed deer aren't like elk or or cattle, in which, you know, one you know, one big buck could have this big group of a dozen does in the wild. They they're they're still kind of one-on-one. They're finding a doe in Estra, spending, I don't know, maybe 24, 48 hours with that doe, and then trying to find another one and then another one, and it just it limits the number of opportunities that that buck could have outside of a pen situation. And so even your you would like to have your biggest antlered bucks do almost all the breeding. But when he's got to compete with these other bucks and find these does one on one, it just limits the the number that he can breed. And so, you know, we we we don't really see a you know a We we were able to create a situation where most of the bucks were above average, but each one of them was only contributing a couple of buck fawns per year. You know, and so contrast that with a pen situation where you can have 15 doughs and then probably get a lot higher fawn survival because you're in a captive situation, and then be able to cherry pick the best one or two from that group and have them do breeding just like that. But in the you know, in these high fence areas, which are thousands of acres, you know, they're they've just got to you know, fend for themselves out there. And there's just a limit on how many that that each one, each individual buck can can find and breed. And in those situations, even when we create a very intense culling, I think in the in that one pasture where we were culling all age classes, I mean, we were getting, you know, five to one dough to buck ratios, you know. And so you think, well, there's not much competition there. We've taken away all the competitors. So probably these young bucks should be able to breed. But that's not what we see. Almost all the fawns were sour by these mature bucks, even under those conditions, you know, and so you know, it it it it it produced a situation that exactly like you want, and that you're having almost all the breeding done by these mature bucks who have a lot more reliable, you know, signal of genetic quality. But then because the yearling antler traits are not a very reliable signal, the next year almost all of their offspring get culled. Right. You know? Because they don't meet the minimum for yearlings was like six antler points, which is a really tall bar for that area.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 24:04

Very ambitious.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 24:05

I mean, even for I mean, that ranch has produced a number of of you know, net boonic crockett, you know, I mean, they they they've got good potential there, but for yearlings, there's not very many of them that that get to six or better. And so you're just every year com almost completely wiping out the age class, and maybe have one or two of those yearlings that met the six-point threshold, but then the next year they might not meet the threshold at two years, so then you'd cull them. So after about three years, you completely wipe out the age class doing that. Uh it just you just couldn't ever get over the bar with those young deer. But if you say, okay, well, let's not cull the young deer, let's just cull the mature bucks, well, then you've had you're really hitting the mature bucks hard, and it's letting the young deer do a little bit more breeding, but they're not subject to the culling yet. So I mean, it's just it just you know, it it all sounds good in theory, but in practice, you just don't have the control, you know. Yeah.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 25:12

I mean, and it's if you could control for all those details, but you're even still.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 25:16

And you can, you can build a breeding pin and control.

unknown 25:20

Right.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 25:20

Right.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 25:21

And under those situations, it can work. In the free ranging, you know. I mean, even high-fence areas, you know, it it's it's still pretty inefficient. If it's, you know, low fence, just forget about it.

Why Yearling Antler Size Is a Poor Predictor of Quality

Dr. Bronson Strickland 25:35

But Randy, you've got that you got that population level heritability estimate, which is it it's current please correct me, it's never going to be above 0.5 or 50%. It's it's typically 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, right? For the your typical antler metric heritability estimate?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 25:57

Yeah, it kind of depends on what antler trait, you know, we I think we were mostly we were doing the culling on antler points and gross Boone and Crockett in the Comanche part. And then, you know, so it depends on what antler trait you're looking at. So gross Boone and Crockett was a little bit more reliable. We were getting, you know, 30, 40 plus percent, you know, for for three and a half year old and older bucks. So that's saying a heritability, let's say if it's 40 percent, that means that all the differences between all these bucks and antler size, about 40% of those are due to what they've inherited from their parents, you know. And so, you know, that's still good enough to do selection. But what it what it what it tells you is you can predict how much progress per generation you can make. So, you know, with that 40%, you know, let's say, you know, we want to estimate how much progress we can make. And so we have an average mature buck, let's just say 130. If we want to produce above average buck funds, then we would like to have our sires be above average. And so, however far above average, let's say we can get a 180 sire. Okay, that's 50 inches above average. And theoretically, 40% of that would be our potential gain if we could select on both parents. But we don't know what the dough is carrying, so that means what we what our potential is is about half of that. You know? And so let's say we do you know, forty percent times fifty inches divided by two, that's what we could expect on the average per generation. If our sires were all above one eighty. Right?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 28:01

Yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 28:02

But most of them were in the 150 to 170 range, with some of them bigger, but again, those individual sires weren't producing dozens of buck fawns every year, they were producing a handful at best. Right. So, you know, when you when you mash all this together, your average that gain per generation, I think we were predicting, you know, we could probably get maybe five Boone and Crockett gross inches per generation. And a generation be about six to seven years.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 28:41

Not many people have the patience to wait out four to five generations.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 28:46

Right.

The Math Behind Culling

Dr. Bronson Strickland 28:47

Yeah. Or the life, longevity or the the the budget, you know, stuff like that.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 28:54

And so, you know, this is this is basically why, you know, people end up if they're really into that, you know, the you the more control you can put on that, the the better progress you can make. Yeah.

Moriah Boggess 29:10

And realistically, how many generations could you make those improvements?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 29:16

Yeah, so that's another point, is that it's some at some point in time, you're starting out with, you know, kind of a just a regular bunch of wild deer, you know, doing some of this selection for several generations, you're gonna be doing some inbreeding on purpose, right? Because you want to concentrate those good genes. And so at some point that that gain is probably gonna plateau off because you've you've gotten inbred on purpose. You know, I mean, you know, that's that's how that's how we make livestock breeds, dog breeds, you know, whatever. We do a lot of selection to, you know, concentrate those good trades. And so as long as you can weed out the you know, the the bad phenotypes, you know, you can do okay with that. And at some point you'd probably have to bring in some outside, you know, material, some outside genetics to kind of, you know, lessen that. But yeah, at some point it would probably plateau out. These are, you have to understand that a lot of these are kind of simple predictions. There's a lot of stuff in the real world that is not simple, but it works pretty good. And it's, you know, it's kind of, you know, it at least gives you a a yardstick on what you might expect to gain. And sometimes making more complex predictions is not necessarily better. You know, sometimes the simple predictions are are are best because they make fewer assumptions.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 30:46

So, Randy, heritability is the population level estimate for the the amount that we can attribute to genetics versus environment, et cetera.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 30:56

But then the So traits that they're inheriting from their parents, from their close relatives, right? Yeah. So this is where the, you know, they're gonna grow antlers because they're genetically programmed to grow antlers, but the size and shape they're gonna get from their close relatives, right? So that's inheritance versus heritability. Yeah.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 31:21

Okay.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 31:21

And heritability is what we're talking about, the the characteristics that are shared by relatives.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 31:28

So how does the uh breeding value metric, is that more individual-based versus population-based? Heritability is population, breeding value is an individual.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 31:42

Yeah, exactly. So it's it's a it's a just as you say, it's an individual prediction for that individual. So how much better or worse than the than the population average would that be, individual be for that trait? So, you know, all these methods that we're using to estimate all of these, you know, heritability, breeding values, or whatever, you know, they're they're really borrowed from animal science and animal breeding, which has been done, you know, pretty intensively, obviously, for you know, centuries. But, you know, about a hundred or so years ago, when people really started, you know, putting some math behind it, you know, they they realized that if they had enough information, by information, I mean relatives and measurements on relatives, then they can make some really good predictions about what those individuals could do, even with a trait that's not, you know, carried by that sex. So we we deal with antlers, and so only bucks grow antlers. And so that means that, you know, without having a lot of information, we don't really we're not able to really do any selection on the dough side. Well, think about, you know, milking cattle. You know, how do they select bulls? Well, nobody's milked a bull that I'm aware of, but if we have a lot of information on the milking ability of that bull's female relatives, then we can make a prediction for him and his ability to, you know, what are his daughters going to look like. And so the key here is enough information. And when they're doing this in livestock, they have probably thousands to tens of thousands of records for many generations. And so they have a lot, you know, with that kind of information, you can make very good predictions. We have hundreds of records. Maybe a couple thousand, but not, you know, for not very many generations. And for some individuals we have a lot of information, and some we don't have very much. And so we can use it, but it's really not good enough to make the type of predictions like that. Now, what we can do is we can actually see what some of these bucks actually produce. And so it's not a prediction, it's it's we're we can kind of call that a breeding value, but we've essentially captured it by seeing, okay, all of this buck's sons, what do they look like at five years of age? And it turns out that even some of these on the average, if you have bucks that are 180 plus, you know, their their sons are usually above average, on the average. Some individuals are below average. But then a handful of those really big Adler bucks, all of their sons are below average.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 34:46

Yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 34:48

So that's kind of, you know, that that's the problem working with averages, you know, is that, you know, sometimes, you know, this average captures this big range and you're focused on the center line, but you forget that there's a lot that are in that, you know, negative territory as well. Now, why is that? Well, we don't really know. Sometimes it's whatever that buck is carrying, he's not able to pass it on. So one of the big assumptions that this these that these genetic inheritability analyses make is that all the genetic variation is essentially coming from the effects of many genes. So each, you know, each one of maybe a hundred genes contributing a little bit. So they they say it's additive, so they're all contributing some little bit. This one might contribute a little bit more, a little bit less, but they're all contributing, you know, some. But we also know that genes don't always work like that. Sometimes there's one gene that affects a whole bunch of others, not additive. So, you know, that might be some of those cases like that that, you know, where we have those genetic effects that are that are outside of the simplified rules, and that might be kind of affecting some of those situations.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 36:09

Well, one thing you said that confuses me a little bit is probably my misunderstanding about how you calculate breeding value relative to the average value. So, Randy, it's not the case that there would be a in this case with antlers, there's not a correlation between antler size and a buck's breeding value, is there?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 36:36

Yeah, there is, yeah. There is. So that's yeah, so that's kind of without all the the information in the analysis, we're just using the antler size to predict that. And so that's kind of for the individual, we're just assuming that on the average, this bigger antlered individual should have a better genetic breeding value. But the but it's it's actually connecting those two math, you know, with analyses mathematically that we could do if we had a lot more information, you know, like those thousands or tens of thousands of records and many generations and all of that. Yeah, so that's that's that's how you get you know better racehorses and better milking cattle and better, you know, all of these things. They're able to do a lot more, you know, from these predictive metrics, you know. So all we're going off of typically is gonna be the buck's antler size. And there is a relationship, but we're making a lot of assumptions that that relationship is similar for all bucks. And on the average it is.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 37:49

It seems by definition it he's got a greater that that 180 or whatever buck is having a greater metric of breeding value because we're measuring his offspring relative to the average. So what I'm saying uh let's not call it breeding value, let's call it ru reliability. It's almost like saying because that buck is bigger, his individual heritability estimate is greater. Which would be the breeding value. Yeah, that's not convinced.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 38:35

This large antlered buck should have larger antlered signs. Because we know that this trait has a genetic component, and we know about what size it is, and some of them do. But there's also some of them that don't.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 38:56

Okay, but okay, so let's have a scenario here below average. If you had a a sire that scored 125 inches, and just for argument's sake, a hundred percent of the time, 90% of the time, his male offspring were 125 inches. To me, I would look at that and go, you what you see is what you get. It is very reliable. That sire, his offspring are going to look just like it. So, in a scenario like that, what would his breeding value be? Because his offspring are below population average, but it is very repeatable from year to year. It's reliable. The offspring will resemble the sire. Would he have a is that a negative?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 39:45

Yeah, you can have a negative value.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 39:46

That's a negative breeding value. Yeah. Even though it's very reliable, the sire to offspring.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 39:52

Right. Well, you know, another thing to remember too is that, you know, we we talk about these large outlet bucks like they're the same every year. Well, we see some big, you know, big year-to-year changes, you know, in them. And that's one of the, you know, without having individually, you know, uniquely marked, you know, bucks, you know, we might we we have desirable bucks one year, and then the next year they might get cold because they have a bad year and they drop below the average or below the culling, you know, metric. So that's one thing to think about. And two, you know, again, we're thinking on the average, bigger antlered bucks should have a better breeding value, so they should have larger antlered sons. And on the average, smaller antlered bucks should have smaller antlered. And they do, on the average. But there are some individuals in both classes, like some of these smaller antlered bucks, their sons are actually pretty good.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 40:51

Yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 40:51

And some of the bigger antlered bucks, their sons are no good. Yeah. Now, you know, again, that's the problem with dealing with averages. And, you know, without that information of a lot of relatives over many generations, if we had that, we could use that information and not just the buck's antler size. Because one of the things we were, since we had so many repeated measurements of some of these bucks throughout their life, we were able to, you know, get a essentially start breaking down some of that environmental component a little bit. And anywhere from about 20 to 30 percent of all those analysized differences among those mature

Early Life Conditions as a Permanent Environmental Effect

Dr. Randy DeYoung 41:38

bucks was due to this, what we call a permanent effect. So it's something about something what happened to them early in life that either helped them meet their potential or hurt them, you know. And so what is that? Well, we don't know. It's drought, is it injury, is it being a twin versus a singleton, is it, you know, all of these different factors that might go in there. But these early life conditions can be, you know, really persistent. So in other words, that individu that buck might have smaller antlers than his potential. He might not look like he's any good, but he might have good potential. He just can't reach it because he's stunned from his early life experience.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 42:26

But it's possible he could have above average male offspring. Aaron Ross Powell He could, yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 42:30

Or he could have below average.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 42:32

Yeah. On the average. And that's the problem. You don't know. That's right. Yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 42:37

Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, it's without having as much information like that, you know, on the average, antler size is reliable, but just on the average, realizing that there is a lot of, you know, there's a lot of differences between bucks. And, you know, if all we get is their antler size from that particular year, then that's going to limit how efficient, you know, this can be, you know, in the in the wild. Now, the good news of all this is there's, you know, oftentimes a lot of concern of, well, if you shoot out all the good bucks, are we going to high grade, you know, and and kind of ruin things? And I think the door swings both ways. Probably not. You know, I mean, you might temporarily take out a bunch of these bigger antler bucks, but you know, as soon as we get some more, you know, through the the age classes, probably, you know, you'll you'll start seeing some again. Yeah. You know. So, you know, I think it's not all, you know, from a from one standpoint, you know, in in in terms of trying to genetically increase antler size, very difficult. But that also means it's probably very difficult to decrease it as well.

Moriah Boggess 43:53

That's good news for everyone, because I mean everything is too high graded, right? Because if otherwise if it were Too easy, we would be just averages, we're just plummet down and down and down

Genetic High-Grading Is Also Very Difficult

Moriah Boggess 44:05

across all of the the average landscape with small landscape.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 44:08

Yeah, be careful what you wish for. Yeah. Four-point rules or annual part restrictions or whatever, you know? Yeah. So, you know, we kind of think because of a lot of those, you know, if we can't really do it in these intensive situations, it's going to be real difficult to happen out just, you know, in in in regular deer herds, you know. So, you know, some measure, I think, of of you know, good news there.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 44:32

Randy, do you remember what was uh regarding buck breeding success? What was your your your average and maybe some examples of some bucks that were well above average? But in general, what can people expect is going to be your typical breeding success or reproductive output for a buck in a typical population?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 44:54

Yeah, so that's actually kind of a it sounds simple, but think about the scenario we're studying this in. So one, we're only catching antlered bucks. So we can only catch yearling bucks in their first year of life, is the earliest we can catch them. And we're only catching bucks, you know, so that's all we see of that individual's contribution. And we don't catch all the yearlings, so sometimes it takes a year or two to be able to catch them all, and during which time, you know, there's a lot of natural m deaths, you know, whether it's from, you know, mom's in bad nutritional condition because it's a drought and can't make enough milk, and or coyotes, and or whatever else. And so all we're really dealing with is the number of at least yearling bucks produced. And if you but if you look at it like that, I think the I think the most buck buck fawns that that you know that we could sample as yearlings. I think it was probably maybe 10 or so from an individual buck. Probably about 80% of the bucks were either one or two throughout that that long study period, which, you know, for some of them it encompassed their lifetime and some of them it didn't, you know. And some of them we start when we started, they were already in there, and you know, so it's kind of, you know, depends on how you want to start categorizing things. But I think, you know, if you look at outliers, you know, it would be, you know, a handful, very small handful of bucks that had seven, eight, or I think one of them was ten, you know, and then uh one of them eight, and then a couple with seven, and you know, this is out of about twelve hundred bucks, buck offspring, you know, that we caught. So not very many.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 46:55

And didn't you for for and you maybe have followed up on this over the years, but for your PhD work, didn't you do an analysis where you compared the breeding success uh of bucks, so the the offspring they're they're siring and their boon and crockett score versus just the the average boon and crockets score of that age class, and there was no deviation, in other words, there was no disproportionate success when you controlled for age of big antlers relative to small antlers.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 47:29

Yeah, overall, I mean, most of the fawns, if you got mature bucks, they're they're doing a lot most of the breeding as an age class, but each individual is going to be kind of limited in their and you're right. The you know, we didn't really see that the biggest antler bucks are the most fawns, not necessarily. You know, it was it was kind of fairly similar. Now, again, you know, this is only what we're sampling and you know, on and on, but I think that you know, there's not necessarily a big trend for that. And it sounds kind of crazy, but if we start thinking about, well, how does this really unfold through the rut? You know, we've got, you know, going into the rut at some period of time, there's not very many doughs that are coming into Estrus. There's a lot of competition among bucks to find those individual doughs. But then that big Aller Buck is staying with that dough for maybe 24, 48 hours. And while he's with that dough, guess what the other bucks are doing? Well, they're not just sitting on their hands, they're out searching, and you know, so and then you kind of get into the rut and you get more and more doughs coming into Estrus at the same time. And at some point you got that peak that, on the average, there's a lot of does in Estrus at the same time. And those mature bucks, yes, they're all, if they can, if they can locate a dough, they're all, you know, they're all doing their thing, but then that leaves some more opportunities, you know, for some of these other bucks. And that's where we find that the young bucks get their opportunities. And in fact, it may be, you know, maybe it's those mature bucks kind of fighting a little bit and you know, allowing a brief opening for, you know, one of these yearling bucks to run in and and and kind of you know sneak an opportunity, so to speak. So and in fact, we're we had a it was during that King Ratch study that we we were able to, you know, get a lot of deer, you know, sampled from the helicopter capture, but then also get some uh doughs and embryos, you know, sampled. And so that way we had, you know, the the whole contribution from these some of these individuals, and we could also see that you know that there was I think up to about oh fifty percent of those sets of twins

Multiple Paternity & How Young Bucks Sneak Breeding Opportunities

Dr. Randy DeYoung 49:54

had more than one dad.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 49:56

Yeah. Multiple paternity.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 49:58

Almost every one of those involved a younger buck, and they were all, if we since we could get the the conception dates, they were all during the peak. You know, so it really kind of laid out, you know, kind of makes sense, you know, in that respect.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 50:18

So okay, let's go. If you want to talk real quick about so we got what we just went over the the the King Ranch and it's free range, we got the Comanche and wearing clothes, and now concurrently, you were part of a study on the Faith Ranch, where you're using a permitting system from Texas Parks and Wildlife where you can go select sires pre-rud or pre-season on a ranch, capture them, move them into a pen or an enclosure where there's also, I guess, does that were captured on the ranch and placed in that pen. And then maybe you could go through some scenarios there. Do most people then have one sire and a couple doughs, and then so so maybe they they selected five or ten really big sires on the ranch, they capture those, and for each one of those, they give them three, four, five, ten different doughs. Walk walk us through that that

The Faith Ranch DMP Study — Sire Selection in Breeding Pens

Dr. Bronson Strickland 51:24

process.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 51:24

Yeah, so the this this authorization is called the Deer Management Permit or DMP is the acronym that everybody uses. And so it was started, I think, in the late 1990s, that it provided, you know, landowners that are doing intensive management already, typically, because all this is done behind the high fence. Now, some of these high-fenced areas are many thousands of acres, but it's still done, you know, behind high fence. So, what they could do is they could temporarily confine deer from the ranch for breeding purposes. And so, like let's say uh there's some rules on the size of the breeding enclosure has to be, I think, at least five acres, something like that. And, you know, of course, they're providing supplemental feed and water and so on. And so they'll either in the early days they they would allow landowners to bring in captive bucks as sires, but I think a lot of that is is either difficult or impossible to do with with concerns about CWD now. But let's just say you could have as many of these DMP enclosures as you wanted, but maybe typically people might have anywhere from a couple to you know several. They might go out from the ranch, capture, let's say, dozen, fifteen, maybe twenty doughs at the most, put them in there, you know, with a big antler buck. And they'll be doing this, you know, probably October-ish, something like that, you know, after the antlers have hardened. And then they'll leave them there during the breeding season, and then they have to release them back out to the ranch, you know, high fence ranch, you know, that next year. So after the fawns are born, they have to be released back out to the ranch. And so what that does then is obviously it gives you a lot more control over breeding, because that one buck would probably never do that much breeding, certainly not in a single year, maybe not in his lifetime, you know, out just in the pasture. And because those, you know, enclosures are, you know, a lot more enclosed, you also may be able to do a lot more to keep coyotes and and and things out of there. So you might be able to get some more, you know, better fawn survival as well.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 53:44

And so, Randy, are are you just turning the weaned fawns loose, or you have to turn all the adult everything? Yeah. And if you repeat it, you start over the next year. Okay. Yep.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 53:56

Yeah, you know, a lot of times people will, you know, mark those the doughs and things like that. And so they might use some of them again. And then a lot of times people even, you know, walk the the pastures and and ear tag fawns, you know, just to have kind of, you know, known age or recognizable, you know, individuals. And so, in fact, that's what on Faith Ranch, they've been doing this with, you know, they had, you know, two thousand two 1,000 acre high fence pastures, one of them with DMP, and the other one just with, you know, deer that were on the ranch that just got enclosed in there. And so they hunted out all the deer in the DMP side and repopulated that only with DMP-borne fawns. And all these deer were from the ranch. And so after they did this for, you know, 15 odd years or so, you know, we we had a lot of information, you know, we had lots of buck fawns, and we're doing helicopter captures in there in both sides every year to get antler records from you know from all these individuals. And, you know, the sires were anywhere from upper 170s to probably lower 200s, and you know, a lot of really impressive bucks, but you know, it seemed like on the average, the buck fawns that were born in the DMP enclosures, they're probably about 10 inches bigger at maturity than the ones that were just pasture born. But that was also pasture born even in the the a pasture that was receiving only DMP bucks.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 55:43

Yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 55:44

Because after you've done that, you lose control again, right? Even though they're bigger on the average, there's still kind of a bell curve of, you know, okay, we have this 200 inch sire, you know, he's 50 inches or more bigger than the average, but his sons aren't all 200 inches. They might average 160, 170 inches. They might range from 130 to 180, you know, something like that. You know, it's not all of them are 200, you know, because remember, you're also breeding him to these individual doughs, which you don't know what their quality is genetically. And also we have to deal with environment and all these other things. And so, you know, you get a range of outcomes. And some of these bucks produce a lot bigger range than others. So I think they used uh 14 DMP sires during that time period, and 10 of them produced buck fawns who at maturity, so five years old and older, were above average. And four of them produced all of their sons were below average.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 56:59

Wow.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 57:01

Why is that?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 57:02

I don't know. It just is.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 57:06

On the average, they're above average. Yeah. So it's really kind of kind of interesting to kind of see how how you know all these things play out. And when I say above average, sometimes the average was just a little bit above average, but sometimes, you know, I think the best sire, his sons were at least 10 or 15 inches above average, or no, probably close to 20 inches above average for one or two of those. So they they were really above average. Yeah. Now, it's really interesting when you think about, well, what is the average? Well, since we were doing helicopter captures in both sides, we knew what the average was. And the average mature buck, five-year-old and older buck in in both of those was over was about 150 winner crockett.

Results: 10 Inches from Genetics, 20 Inches from Nutrition

Dr. Bronson Strickland 57:59

Which that's pretty dang good. That's a big average, yeah.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 58:03

And so in the previous years doing a lot of research on the ranch, helicopter captures, research, not supplemental feed, things like that. You know, we're looking at about 128 to 130 inches maybe for mature bucks. So that's close to 20 inches in those intensively managed pastures. That's just nutrition. That's all that is. I mean, because that that other side was just whatever deer got enclosed, they had, you know, supplemental feed, had water, nothing else. They're not really hunting these or just kind of leaving them be, you know, taking out some, you know, some doughs and some really, really old bucks to kind of help manage the population, but they were they were looking at them as this is data, you know. And all these, you know, DMP bucks were ear tagged and everything, so they could, you know, they could could track all these individuals, you know, throughout their lifetime. And so yeah, I mean that was kind of the takeaway was on the average, any buck for the fawn that was born in the DMP side, in the DMP pins were about 10 inches above average, some of them much bigger, obviously, but some of them much lower. But then both sides were pretty dang impressive just from the nutrition part alone. So, you know, twenty inches from nutrition, maybe ten from the DMP.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 59:37

Yeah. Man, that is a tremendous amount of effort to not have and expense, not to have a greater quote, DMP effect relative to what you could just gain by improving nutrition.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 59:54

Yeah, and you know, when you say gain, it just kind of people do things for a lot of different reasons, and if you know, maybe if you produced one or two that were well over 200 inches, maybe that's good enough.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:00:10

I you know. I mean And for some people it would be. That'd be completely justifiable.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:00:16

Yep. And some people just want to try it out and see what happens. Uh you know, there's a lot of a lot of ways to measure those things, but you know, so it's kind of in the eye of the beholder whether it's worth it or not. But but it will produce some some, you know, it will produce some better bucks, but it seemed to only have the effect on the ones that were actually born. Because one the the ones that were per produced by, you know, just uncontrolled breeding within that pasture, they look on the average like like the like the non-DMP side. You know, again, because I think you're losing control of breeding, each individual buck is only breeding a few, and you know, you're not concentrating all that reproductive output and so on.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:01:04

Yeah. How has what what's the popularity of the program now? I mean, have people seen enough impact to sustain it and scolded?

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:01:15

You know, off the top of my head, uh we had asked the the deer program coordinator, and you know, they've they just got to be permitted every year, and I think they've got several thousand permitted every year. So now one ranch may have more than one DMP enclosure, you know. So, you know, and you know, you've already got to have some of the infrastructure, these high-fence enclosures and high fence pastures, and then, you know, be willing to, you know, pay for helicopter time, which is not cheap, you know, those kind of things. So it's it's popular enough, you know. There's a lot of people that are that are doing it, at least to some extent. But it's not gonna be the average landowner with a couple hundred acres. Typically, it's gonna be, you know, people that are already doing some more intensive management and you know, kind of want to push the envelope a little bit.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:02:10

Well, I think we've covered it pretty well, unless I have missed something, but thank you, Randy. I think you kind of helped explain this a little bit better in terms of what's going on behind behind the scenes with the breeding success and heritability and the genetics aspect of it. It's it's uh a really, really inefficient process. And then when you can't control for the population being fenced or control dispersal, and you cannot control the sire, you you can coal down and maybe produce a greater frequency of larger antler sires, but now you can't control the the dough side of that equation, and the and then even with some good sires out there, there's individual breeding values for those sires. So we just keep adding in these layers and layers and layers of making it more and more complicated. And so for like the king and the Comanche, that's kind of why we didn't see any results, and then we move into what you just talked about on the faith, where you might see a greater level, a greater impact by by getting a fewer number of sires, controlling the the number of does or they're breeding to and so forth. But they also had the benefit of enhanced better nutrition, and so you know, you've

What Can Landowners Actually Control?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:03:36

got that aspect of it as well. So what are the things you can control? Well, we can control deer density, we can control nutrition, you know, we can age control uh absolutely, we can control our harvest of bucks by let's not shoot the highest quality bucks when they're two or three or even four years of age. Let's let the best quality bucks get to maturity. And then it's kind of in the hands of of Mother Nature after that. You've kind of controlled the things that you can control when you do that.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:04:16

Yeah, and you know, that's uh kind of making the point about, you know, one of them about age, and then others of them about, you know, doing some of the selection stuff. You know, the one thing to really realize is that these were all, you know, they were letting these bucks get to, I mean, to almost to their natural death, most of them. And so we have records on bucks till they're like 12 or 13 years of age. You know, and they they have a prime from like maybe five to like eight or so. And after that, they kind of start dipping down, you know, in average antler size and so on. But, you know, having that extra feed tends to get you better fawn survival and also better adult survival. They live longer, you know, and they're healthier. So the feed is pretty expensive, and especially they're eating that much of it in those environments, but it it gets you more rolls of the dice, so to speak, you know, whereas if you weren't doing that that much feeding, you'd have a a lot more, you know, loss of fawns just due to droughts and and and and various things like that. And the other thing is that, you know, I think you talk to a lot of people, and there's people that have been doing a lot of culling and they're happy, they think it works. There's people that don't do very much or any, and you know, their program works for them, you know. So if people have something they feel like is working, it might not be working for the reason why you think it is, but does that really matter? You know. I mean you know, it's just kinda you know I think that's something to keep in mind too, is that if you are in a position where, okay, we're gonna provide all this supplemental feed, kinda expensive, do I wanna invest in this young buck for another three or four more years of eating feed? Or I've got plenty of bucks. Maybe we take some of those out. And, you know, that's not a genetic thing. That's just a that's just a straight management management tool. So there's nothing wrong with culling, you know, to make that point pretty clear is that you know, if there's bucks that have undesirable landler traits, well, there's no reason to leave them out there necessarily, you know, as long as you you're doing a lot of the other things, you know, right. But the you know, one thing that was that was

Are Spikes Genetically Inferior? What the Data Says

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:06:52

it it's it sounds kind of like a paradox, but you know, the going back to these old arguments about spike yearlings versus forks, you know, the spikes are inferior and genetically and all that. Well, we didn't see that they were necessarily genetically different, but it was really clear that at five years old plus that any buck that was a spike as a yearling was close to ten inches smaller boonic crockett than any buck that was a four-counter. Now, there was a lot of overlap, but on the average, those bucks were smaller. Now, many of them turned into pretty nice bucks, you know, 140, some of them 150. But on the average, so you know, again, that's probably some of these early life experiences that are, you know, this permanent inf of environmental you know influence, things like that, that they're not able to achieve their potential. But from a management standpoint, you know, that might mean that, wow, you know, I don't want to keep, you know, throwing feed down this dude's throat, you know, especially with the cost of some of this stuff, you know, the you know, kind of allow you to, you know, maybe make a you know, make some adjustments if you choose to. Now, the number of people that probably need to do that, I don't know, maybe not that many. But, you know, it's it's it's I guess just making the point that, you know, calling is a viable tool, and in some situations, you know, it may still might make a make sense to you know take out some of those bottom level. But, you know, the one thing usually we're short on is mature bucks. And so, you know, the more young bucks you remove, the fewer mature bucks you have. And so you can, if it doesn't bother you investing a couple more years in them, they'll probably turn out to be a pretty nice, you know, at least management level buck, or maybe a little bit better.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:08:49

So yeah, what like around these parts, survival's pretty reliable. I mean, we can have some EHD outbreaks or you know, some flooding if you're along the Mississippi River. But yeah, it's really about uh assessing what is your density, what is your buck density, what is your standing crop, and and and just placing very reliable bets that if you already have mature bucks and the throughput of middle-aged bucks to getting to mature bucks is a in a reliable system, then you can effectively remove some of those below average middle-aged bucks and free up space. And that that's what Moriah and I and others around here talk about all the time. It has nothing to do with genetics. There's no promise of them making any improvement at all. It's about food conservation. That that's really it's another way, and we're not saying you don't kill does either. We absolutely you say, but it's just another way to produce an abundance of food.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:09:51

Yeah, and that's a good point, too, that on some of these, if if it's done on younger animals, th this would only be like in a in a high fence type of deal. And so if it's not, then you know, because especially those yearlings, most of them are gonna leave anyway, you know. So why bother putting a lot of effort onto them if they're gonna leave as it is, you know.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:10:14

So Randy, we really appreciate

Closing & Thank You

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:10:16

it. Thank thank you for your time and educating all of us. So we appreciate that. Thank you.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:10:21

Yeah, well, thanks for the invite. And you know, let me know if hopefully if if hopefully it's clear as mud, and if if it's not, we can we can clear it up.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:10:31

Well, I mean, if you could just go do something significant again, you know, we could we could have you back on here, but until then, forget it.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:10:41

Yeah, well, don't hold your breath.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:10:44

All right, guys. Thank you so much. Enjoyed it.

Dr. Randy DeYoung 1:10:47

Yeah.

Outro

Moriah Boggess 1:10:49

Thanks for listening to the Wildlife Investments Podcast. For more information on these topics or to see some of the projects our team is working on, follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Wildlife Investments, or visit wildlifeinvestments.com.