00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening past, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I t E dot com. Kevin Monteeth is here today, second podcast appearance. You’re one of the top favorite UH guests we’ve ever had. You’re just saying that to be nice. I’m telling people love that show, dude. That was a big show. Over the years, we’ve had some big shows that people really liked and just gen RD a lot of stuff. That was a big show. That was episode one, six two and it was called Landscape of Fear. Now we’re all the way up on episode seven five, so lots changed. Randall’s hair has grown like that and been cut back. That was just dozens of times since then.
00:01:19
Speaker 2: Just a few weeks before Karin and I started, I think so.
00:01:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, Phil was just getting out of high school. Kevin is here, So Kevin is the Professor of Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Wyoming’s hob Hob School of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Zoology and Physiology. He is the leader of the Monteeth Shop. He is here to dispel almost everything you think in fact about deer, about deer, about deer and elk, about antlers. He dispelled it before and he’ll dispel it again in a new way. Puzzle other things. All I do now when I’m talking every time, And I had to do this the other day. I had to do this the other day. Who did I do it to? I’m trying to think, Oh, Morgan Potter, a professional hunter in Africa. He was laying on me the whole genetics. Oh, this area doesn’t have good deer. This you know, not laying it on me. I don’t mean to, like, you know, he’s a buddy of mine, the whole, like Letteria doesn’t have good genetics. And I had to lay on him the whole. Not so fast. There’s a lot more to the picture.
00:02:34
Speaker 3: To see him stiffen up there.
00:02:39
Speaker 1: Like like to get into it. Oh not that I said, Yeah, lot goes into it.
00:02:45
Speaker 3: I think it might have also been a reaction to some of.
00:02:47
Speaker 1: The listen, this isn’t a this isn’t a weapon. This is an antique. I’ll explain it in a second, because it’s relevant to my life right now, relevant to your life. Yeah, not really. For instance, just to just to give you a pre titillation about what’s going to happen, Kevin’s just showing me a picture of a buck, a mual to your buck. Anyone on the planet. Anyone on the planet would look at this buck and declare it to be a classic year and a half old buck, a classic first rack, like a spiky little buck with little offshoots. You’d be like, that’s a year and a half old buck. Every guy would say that. I would tell my kids if they’d be like, is it a big one? If they got it, I’d be like, that’s a year and a half old buck. It ain’t. It’s two and a half years old. At three and a half, you look at it and be like, eah, probably not a year and a half old, but still looks like that. A buck that’ll be a runt for the rest of his life. Not because he’s from an area with bad genetics. It’s because his mom was an piss poor shape when she was pregnant with him. Correct, that’s right. We’re gonna get into all that and a lot more. Lots of good research, lots of good research. For first tell, we were just talking about how you call your place your outfit, which is kind of funny. You call it the monteeth shop, and we’re talking about it in like in the trades. You know, you meet at the shop. I don’t care if you’re a tree surgeon, whatever, Millwright, you go meet at the shop. Then you go off to your job site. And it’s funny that you called your scientific lab your shop. Yeah, because there’s work going on there. There’s there’s work going on there. Yeah, And we definitely catch him flak for it because, yeah, because it doesn’t sound official enough, doesn’t fit right.
00:04:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you’re going to be a I don’t know, a scientist or a group that does science, the typical reference is a lab. And I think that’s at least in the in the academic world, that’s that’s the norm. And I think despite working in an academic world, I don’t think I’ve ever I don’t think I’ve ever fit the mold. I don’t think I necessarily have a desire to fit the mold, and so in thinking about what it meant for us over time and who we were to be referenced as in that way. To me, what made more sense if we’re going to be data generators, hands dirty in the field, and you know, being able to do the work that puts us in as close proximity the animals that we do. To me, what made sense is a shop something that’s more that associated more with the trades, or like a mechanic shop for example. I often maybe reference us as like diagnostic mechanics, working to hands dirty in there, working to figure out what’s going on with any you know, particular animal population and working to understand them better. So and I think, I don’t know, I guess like my upbringing and who I am at heart, it fits a lot better than being referenced as as a lab.
00:06:05
Speaker 1: So despite the flack that we get for it, we stuck with it. Oh yeah, I wouldn’t pay attention to that before. Before I explain this this year knife I’m home. Uh, you got a mon Teeth shop shirt on that has what I thought was a bigfoot guy pumping iron. You did not. You did think that, and it’s not that correct. Okay, what is it, Because this is something I hadn’t heard of. I’m embarrassed to have not as much as I hear you talk about Beaver as he’s got a picture on his shirt of a bigfoot pumping iron lifting a stick, except except it’s not. Yeah.
00:06:43
Speaker 3: It actually reminds me of the the sand creatures in Star Wars when they shake their Yeah, the Tuesking Raiders when they shake their things at one another.
00:06:54
Speaker 1: That’s good. That’s good. Thanks. Speaking of which we’re trying to I’m trying to license a song right now that has a line. We did a couple of favors for a guy who looked like a Tusk and Raider. M No, we did a couple of favors for some guys who look like Tusk and Raiders.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: Is based on a true story.
00:07:14
Speaker 1: I doubt it, Okay, go on.
00:07:18
Speaker 4: So it’s a beaver holding up a stick, and part of that is the artwork was done by one of our former team members, ran In, jacobek In. We just started doing some work on Beaver’s here over the past couple of years and sort of yeah became we became aware of this behavior, and it’s a behavior often that’s very rarely seen in beavers, but there’s a scientific paper on it, and if you if you google stick display in beavers, there is a YouTube video demonstrating them doing it. But amidst like territory holders are at the edge kind of the fringes of potential territories. That’s sort of antagonistic behavior. They’ll they’ll pick up a stick and just go up and down and up and down with that, with displaying that stick. And I don’t know, I think it’s kind of funny too, given that, you know, most of our work is on big ungulates, and we’ve done a good bit of work on horns and antlers and those sorts of things. Then what they’re used as is weapons and forms of intimidation and display. And beavers don’t have antlers or horns on their heads, but perhaps picking up a stick it does some.
00:08:26
Speaker 1: Sort of has some sort of intimidation element. He’s getting pumped exactly. No, that’s exactly right.
00:08:37
Speaker 4: Our stickers have that saying underneath it speaks offten and carry a big stick.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s either you know, if you really dug into it, is it uh like a fitness display? You know? Is like is it like hey man, like this is a hard thing to pull off, right, what we were at this when I was just in in Africa, We’re hanging out these MASSI dudes and they like they have there’s this traditional dance in Messiah culture where it’s trying like young men and young women. And in this dance there’s like a couple. There’s like a display, an athletic display of men, which is just a flat footed jump m again and again like a spring like from a flat footed stance that you just jump again and again and again and like get some impressive height, dude. Especially when I when I was like, let me give it away, I was like impressive height. And then the right it’s just a asking like what is it all about. It’s just like showing game. Yeah, a flat footed jump, you know. And then for the women, it’s kind of like a you put this disc around your neck and it’s like a I rating move to make the disc shiver. All right, it’s just showing what you got. So that beaver could.
00:10:06
Speaker 4: Be like exactly balance strength, yeah saying I’m gonnahoop you with this.
00:10:11
Speaker 3: Stick, or it’s like this is the kind of stuff we got around here.
00:10:17
Speaker 1: You know, you know I had a beaver. I had a beaver interaction their day of my my my boys. Uh, his buddy’s family. They had Beaver’s plugging up their irrigation crop irrigation system. And I’m went over to advise him. I’m trying to get rid of them. And I made some cast or mound sets just I took Beaver’s case. It seemed like just one beaver kind of like doing his deal put castor out. He just left. I like, I don’t know, I can’t prove this. I feel like he had like a oh ship, someone’s already here and like left. I’m telling you he left. He’s gone. We keep checking he’s gone. That’s wild. He had these little dams in this, you know, in an irrigation deal. Yeah, he had these little dams. He had a couple of little ship and cast or mounds the size of a cell phone. You know what I mean. We put like a big old cat, two big old caster mounts. Dude, I’m not kidding that dude moved out, which could be like something interesting to develop for like sort of like non lethal non lethal deal is get after him early and just like sorry boys, making sorry boys, there’s already a bad mobile in town. Man. You better go find a new spot to hang out. So he and it did him good because he’s alive. He lived to tell the tale. Yeah, oh, this knife. So how they do villas in town? Ak Moosey. I screwed up in my head and I didn’t think that she would be here. She could be hanging out right now, but I just didn’t think about it. I didn’t think andy by the time I invited her. We started, We’re recording at nine. Occurred to me at eight forty two. Invite her. She wasn’t able to make it shooting pistols. But I’m going to have her fix this because she’s a leather sower. My old man brought this home from North Africa and whiskey. Whiskey too. That’s like gotta be elephant ivory. Yeah, take a look at that. Oh yeah, that’s awesome. It’s gotta be elephant. I don’t know what the hell. I don’t know what kind of ivory it is.
00:12:24
Speaker 5: It looks exactly like some of this stuff that I have from my grandmother that was from China.
00:12:30
Speaker 1: So from China, mm hmm, it’s from North Africa. No, I know.
00:12:34
Speaker 5: I’m just saying, like a little Confucius statue carved in irony.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: Oh, I thought, you mean, you’re accusing my dad of bringing home some kind of souvenir knockoff defense just like that. Where’s the stick? Yeah? He So he was real like whatever it was, he was. I still remember what he told me about it. He was real particular about it though. And this she is a weird leather. Look at that leather. I’ve had some people say maybe ostrich, but you can’t see a lot of times an ostrich leather. You can see there, you can see the follicle for the feather. I need to have it stitch back up. That was unstitched when I was born. Oh so it’s been that way it was. So you know what I just did. I took mineral oil. I put that. I took that sheath and put mineral oil a little a couple of tablespoons of mineral oil in a vac bag and stuck that sheath in there and vac sealed it. Which I’m gonna patent as a way to like bring leather back to like picture what I’m talking about. It’s good. Patent it so no one else can do it. Let’s say check with me. Take like an old whatever old leather belt, whatever, it’s kind of played out, Put oil in a bag, vac seal it in that bag. Then let it sit on your work bench for a couple of days and open it up, and that sucker is rejuvenated. Now. Let guy might tell me that there’s a reason that that’s dumb or not a good idea, but I don’t know.
00:14:03
Speaker 3: Or he might tell you that people are already doing that.
00:14:05
Speaker 1: You could tell me that. You could tell me, yeah, don’t be surprised when he pulled something out and I fell apart. I don’t know, but I think I’m onto something. But I need to have it stitch back up. But isn’t that something I want to you know, like those antique road show things? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, like what is up with this thing? Randall wanted to know if he came home from the war and it had crowd blood all over it. But I don’t know that he uh, I told him already cleaned it all off. Randall’s got back from Germany so much to Steve chagrin. Yeah, I don’t like that one bit. So you’re glad that I’m back. No, I’m glad you’re back, But I felt I was nervous the whole time you’re over there that things might break out again. Norm McDonald used to talk about that. Yeah, everybody’s always worried about like, uh, North Russia. He’s like, why are they not worried about the Germans? We’ve already wars with them? Do you think it’s over now?
00:15:14
Speaker 6: Uh?
00:15:15
Speaker 1: Yeah? Oh one other quick thing. I don’t want to take up too much of our time. But you know how like I’m bad on sports. I’m bad on like just generally very ignorant about athletics. I was getting my haircut. I get my haircut VI I p barbershop, which is great. You gotta call ahead, but it’s great. And one thing I like about it is they always playing sports with the volume off, which I was better you know that way. And because it like during the during the Summer Olympics, it was cool because you just watched these people run around the track but you can’t hear what’s going on. I thought it was very soothing. I’m in there the other day and like the big Old there’s a huge TV screen. It’s the only thing in there. They they don’t really it’s not really like mega decorated, but there’s a huge TV screen, and so normally you sit, like when you’re getting your haircut, you’re looking at the screen, but when you’re waiting, your backs to the screen. But the other wall is a giant mirror, and I’m just kind of lost in my thoughts half watching a baseball game, but it’s in a mirror, okay, which I didn’t think about. And every time a guy hits.
00:16:29
Speaker 3: The ball, he’d.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: Run the other way, and I’m like, sitting there. I’m honestly guy sitting there, Like when did they change that? I swear, I swear I was almost gonna ask captain the barber. I was almost gonna be like, why do these dudes take off running like the other way that what you normally would run. All of a sudden it occur to me. I’m like, oh, it’s reversed.
00:16:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, well you’re probably excited because he thought he’s that boy. The prevalency of left handers is really going up in professional.
00:17:03
Speaker 1: Sports, I felt. I was so. I was like, so, I was so ready to open my mouth and like, hey, why are they? Yeah, could have been majorly embarrassed. Yeah, a couple quick news bits here. Let me look here a minute. Oh, movie’s coming out I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about this before. There’s a movie coming out where Bamby goes and seeks revenge. Have you heard about this? It’s called The Reckoning bamb be the Reckoning. Well, everybody says Bamby. But isn’t it like Bamby’s kid. How does it work? No, no, bam Bamby’s dad gets killed. Yeah, the mom.
00:17:46
Speaker 3: Yeah that’s who gets killed.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: Right, No, this is his old man, Yeah there is. Yeah, remember Spencer tried to work up how many inches of antler? Oh yeah, yeah he Bamby and his dad had the buck does get killed.
00:18:03
Speaker 3: But I feel like Bambi is also an orphan, right, so maybe there’s Yeah, they call it in a while to be honest, it’s a CE tier creature feature.
00:18:13
Speaker 1: I guess that means poor graphics.
00:18:15
Speaker 6: It’s it’s made by the same studio that made a bunch of Winnie the Pooh horror films as well. It’s like as soon as they enter a certain form of public domain, they just go buck wild on these things.
00:18:26
Speaker 1: Interesting.
00:18:27
Speaker 5: Yeah, So the story is like it it drinks some toxic something or other and then it becomes monsterized and it has like a million.
00:18:36
Speaker 1: Just like Ninja Turtles, the grieving deer decides to take a sip of the nefarious chemical that local corporation Wilburg’s. It’s always there’s always a lot of these movies. There’s the animal movies. Is usually a bad corporation.
00:18:53
Speaker 3: There’s a strand of anti capitalism and all of these.
00:18:56
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, my kids in this little My kids in this little song and dance up right now for a week, like just to keeping busy, my little one, just keeping busy before we go to Alaska, you know. And he’s coming home singing. They’re teaching them a song. It’s like a it’s like a it’s like a flat out like anti capitalist song. He comes home every night and practice.
00:19:15
Speaker 2: Is it the one from the Loraxe?
00:19:17
Speaker 3: Is it?
00:19:18
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:19:18
Speaker 6: My kids at that same song and dance club. Yeah, oh what’s his name? I’ve got two I’ve got two kids in in there right now. I think Yanni’s daughters have done it as well.
00:19:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you think your kid and my kid are in the same song and dance.
00:19:31
Speaker 2: It’s very it’s very well. He’s he’s not doing the Lorax song.
00:19:34
Speaker 1: Comrades.
00:19:36
Speaker 6: Now there’s different age groups and it’s not like the lore Ax was a book written decades ago the exact anti capitalist sentiment, and.
00:19:44
Speaker 1: So it has nothing to do with the Lorax book. It’s a guy with corporate attorneys. It’s like, has nothing to do with the Lorax book.
00:19:51
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, but it’s a it’s about him cutting down the trees to make the needs and and he’s draining the resources dry without a thought of the planet or.
00:20:00
Speaker 1: No, that’s not in the song. I invite you to look at the songs.
00:20:08
Speaker 2: Is it the one that says how how bad can I be?
00:20:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s like he’s like talking about his corporate attorneys are denying. Yeah, it’s like this whole either way.
00:20:18
Speaker 3: So next week it’ll be the International that one land.
00:20:26
Speaker 2: It’s over my head.
00:20:28
Speaker 1: I don’t get it. What’s the joke?
00:20:30
Speaker 3: That’s the old isn’t it the old socialist anthem?
00:20:33
Speaker 1: I don’t know. Sorry, Kevin, you got you got stomach for one more news bit? Yeah?
00:20:44
Speaker 7: Yeah, coming Baby movie is coming out where Bambi becomes a fanged, bloodthirsty monster who will stop at nothing to attack his prey.
00:20:59
Speaker 1: And uh, there is prey humans or we don’t know.
00:21:08
Speaker 3: Assuming there’s a lot of blue collar men.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: Yea, well, driving around in Like there’s a whole genre of these movies, like like animated animal movies. There’s a whole genre where the bad guy is a Southern, a Southerner who hunts. You know. I’ve talked about this one show a bunch of times. There’s a show my kids used to like, I I didn’t like. I’m watching it and there’s like a couple of there’s like rotating cast of bad guys. One of the bad guys was a wild Game chef. One of the bad guys was like a very yeah. He was a very like effeminate urban nite. Yeah. And one was like a Southern chef. H the villains, Okay, we’ve talked about on the show This is news Ish. We’ve talked about on the show and demonstrated in various video projects. We’ve done the process called ek g MA. You familiar it’s a fish dispatch method. Oh no, uh. My first introduction to EKGM was not by it’s a Japanese word. My first introduction to ekg MA was not having anything to do with the Japanese and not having anything to do with fish. But it was demonstrated to me in South America with a a giant river turtle, which is a seighti species. But these native dudes had a net and they were using the net to catch fish, and this big turtle gets wrapped up in their net, a giant river turtle, and we’re in a camp together. They take the turtle. We weren’t able to film this because they explaining to us that, like, it’s kind of a no no, but the turtle got in the nets, so there’s what could they do about it? Even though they could let either way, They go get it. They go and cut a switch like a big slender stick and peel the bark off it and basically make like a what would look like a like a like a hot dog roasting skewer, okay, or like a marshmallow stretch mellow, and take the turtle and flop cut his head off. Now, when I used to process turtles, we would cut their head off. Then you hang them up by the tail and it would be hours hours before you could pull his leg and his leg didn’t suck back into his shell right, you’d like you’d hold out a pair of channel locks. This is how my dad taught me to do it. It’s kind of gruesome. It’s just how a Scofia explains it in Legee cue lan Air. But you hold out a pair of channel locks, so the turtle grabs the channels, grabs onto it, and you pull out and decapitate them, just like you’re cutting head off a chicken. This is just how it was demonstrated me as a child. And then you hang the turtle up and eventually you pull his leg and it doesn’t pull back, and then it’s time to clean the turtle. These guys in South America, they took a machete fuck and then took that long skewer and inserted it into the spine and ran that skewer all the way down that spine till it was in its tail, and that turtle melted, I mean melted. It was just like after they cut the head off. Immediately immediately cut the head off, ran that skewer yu and there wasn’t because like a turtle is a I don’t know what’s going on the nerve.
00:25:05
Speaker 3: Like you know, like disrupting all the nerves.
00:25:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like think of the expression like running around like a chicken when its head cut off, which I demonstrate, which I mentioned to my kids all the time when we’re hunting, Like they’ll hit something and it’ll kind of do a little mad dash and they feel real bad for it, and I’ll be like, well, you know, think about it, like someone cuts the chicken’s head off, it runs all over hell, right, it’s like dead but not dead. So it just like it melted the turtle. I never seen anything like.
00:25:31
Speaker 4: It.
00:25:33
Speaker 1: Turns out this is a common fish dispatching method in Japan, and I’ve gone with a friend of mine. She was koreaeing, but still, uh we would. She would catch a fish and immediately cut its tail, just cut through the cut through the cut through the tail to sever the backbone the spine at the tail point right, and then you kind of cock the tail so it’s still connected by skin, but it’s now cocked back, folded over. And then she take this brass wire. She had copper wire maybe whatever the hell it was, copper wire. She take this copper wire and just in that in that spine, you follow me the spinal core, they’re basically going, and that fish just again just is like done. You know, you think of a fish flopping for a long time whatever, you know, and like and it influences how that fish goes through rigor, and it’s just like the fish is just dead or and dead.
00:26:37
Speaker 3: Uh.
00:26:38
Speaker 1: This guy here, there’s this company, Shinkle Systems. They’ve built a robot that uses the Japanese ekg MA method of killing fish, which they regard as the most humane way to harvest the animal while producing the best quality meat. The process involves inserting I forgot this part. It’s kind of like a ancillary part of the things. You put a spike in the fish’s brain first. So the process involves inserting a spike into the fish’s brains. Who that or is caught killing it instantly, reducing distress that can cause the fish to spoil more quickly. Oh, oh, he’s not talking about what that’s what he’s talking about. Not running the hold Cranky Randall anyone. Their machine isn’t the spine reaming machine. Their machine is just a spike to the head machine. Do you need a machine that seems that seems a lot easier.
00:27:45
Speaker 5: To make it stuns the fish to help humans do that method.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: So it’s a robot that stuns a fish. Yes, this is what you get for talking about news articles you haven’t read, do you know what I mean? Like people are always saying like, why an article this morning? And I’m like, I always go like, eh, you know, I don’t really read it. I mean I saw it. Oh, but the guy says a weird thing. So he’s talking about how he’s what huh okay, well making the subsequent cuts in seven seconds? Is he reaming the spines or not?
00:28:34
Speaker 5: The human does it? The machine stuns them.
00:28:38
Speaker 1: Shinkles okay. Shinkle’s refrigerator size machine called Poseidon is his operational.
00:28:46
Speaker 2: Steve reads news so you don’t have to.
00:28:49
Speaker 1: It’s operational on three fishing vessels off the US West Coast. The fish is inserted into the robot, which then uses computer vision to identify the speed. And it’s anatomical information spiking the brain and making the subsequent cuts in seven seconds. It might be that the bad this is a bad writer who wrote what I’m reading.
00:29:14
Speaker 3: Clearly subsequent cuts makes me think that it’s doing more than did.
00:29:22
Speaker 1: It’s reem and the spine. This guy raised twenty two billion bucks for this thing. You know what really turns me off though it is one of his co quotes. He’s got a quote that I think is indefensible. Where is this quote? Oh, here’s a quote from this guy who builds himself is not builds himself former SpaceX engineer. But I don’t see SpaceX engineer and think fisheries primarily because they’re very interested in Mars and there ain’t no life on Mars. Like I don’t want to go there. You know. He says, we’ve been fishing for forty thousand years and the tools haven’t really changed.
00:30:11
Speaker 3: A little bit of his oversimplification.
00:30:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, are you all aware of a thing called sonar guided bottom trawling? I mean, holy cow, he’s saying that, like nothing’s changed in forty thousand years, But now we have a robot that can poke a hole in the fish’s head, and this is like the right this is the right direction. I’m like, nothing’s changed in forty thousand years of fishing.
00:30:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, good lilastics, internal combustion engines.
00:30:40
Speaker 1: Sonar guided bottom trolls which can literally which can literally scrape underwater spires. Whatever. There’s another big article about lab grown meat and fish, which Krinn put in here and then out and another back in here again.
00:31:02
Speaker 2: We don’t have to cover it.
00:31:03
Speaker 1: No, we’re not could cover it. Okay, I don’t care if everybody eats it.
00:31:05
Speaker 5: I don’t want it well, this was more on the lab lab grown fish that it’s you know, making its uh, it’s getting into some good restaurants or I don’t know if restaurants in Portland. And there are seven states that made it illegal, and the news bit is that last month Texas was the seventh or eighth state.
00:31:25
Speaker 1: Our own, our own great state made it illegal. Florida, Alabama, Arizona, Tennessee, Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska have done various things to like prevent or slow down or ban cultured cell cultured meat. Texas just did it in June. Yeah, I thought they maybe that’s a little bit bit, that’s a little bit big brother for my likings. But like I can’t get worked up about it because that is I’m kind of grossed out by by lab grown meat. But krinn By saying good restaurants, think about what you’re saying. Though, the articles point out how a Haitian restaurant in Portland is serving lab grown salmon. Now I haven’t been to like Haitia recently, but is there is there like a lot of big Haiti What did I call it? Tells you how long I’ve.
00:32:18
Speaker 7: There?
00:32:20
Speaker 1: Like salmon is a part of Haitian cuisine.
00:32:23
Speaker 5: A good the chef is, you know, Wan in a James Beard Awards, So I think that that puts him at some kind of level.
00:32:34
Speaker 1: I’ve been nominated for James Beard Awards, and I don’t feel like I’m at any level. Okay, you ready to dig in? Sure? All right? How do we start? Because you guys, you guys do so much work. Man, Can we start with a recap? We do whatever?
00:32:49
Speaker 4: Let me start with the recap. What kind of recap do you want? Can you recap for? Can you recap for for us and our listeners?
00:32:59
Speaker 1: Just kind of like I’m sure you give the spiel all the time, the spiel about when we see an area that we declare like bad genetics or Bucks don’t get big there. You know that area has got big Bucks because it’s got good genetics. What is that shorthand for? You know what I mean? Like like like what are some of the things that actually in your mind? And it could include genetics, but like what are the sort of hidden factors that are driving whether you’re seeing big giant Bucks and you’re part of the state you know, Yeah, well, I mean there’s not too big of a question. No, No, you’re good.
00:33:41
Speaker 4: I’m just trying to figure out how to lean into the age genetics and nutrition effect anly size. Tell me again, age genetics nutrition cut and much of our focus for a long time, and certainly within you know, hunting communities as well, we tend to off addly and frequently refer to genetics.
00:34:02
Speaker 1: Right.
00:34:02
Speaker 4: It’s hard to it’s hard to open up a magazine and see an article written, you know, about some big buck or big bowl that somebody harvested, and inevitably it’s like, man, the genetics in this area are just fantastic. You know, sure large antlers, and there’s an aspect of that that is that is true, like to to grow you know, a substantial set of antlers horns, you need to have genetics that support that. Right, But we also we also get ourselves in this situation, as we frequently refer to that, and I think I think where some of that’s come from is we we’ve called it our our hornographic culture, where we’re so fork focused on horns, antlers, their size, Like, we’re so drawn into that all we can think about is males and the crap that’s growing on their head. And so we’ve we’ve referenced that as our our honographic culture. And there’s elements of that that are good.
00:34:58
Speaker 3: That doesn’t all the greatest shirt dude, pornography hornography.
00:35:04
Speaker 1: We got to can you check someone right away for someone steals this idea this is going on. It’s yeah, a buck mounting a dough and it says hornography a big buck and proceeds going, and then yeah, and and and yes, that’s perfect protease, proceeds go directly to me. Proceeds shot. Is that fair? Yeah? One hundred You don’t care if we steal that. I didn’t clear that well, yeah, but he said.
00:35:36
Speaker 3: I just sort of threw it out there.
00:35:37
Speaker 1: No, no, no, that’s how we’re gonna do it. I think. No, that’s how we’re definitely gonna do it. We just stole it flat out from the guy, and it recorded.
00:35:46
Speaker 4: We’ve used that term in a scientific paper, in two scientific papers. I mean we laid it out in a in a scientific.
00:35:53
Speaker 1: Paper, so so it exists. Can we do the thing, and then if we do, proceeds go to you guys. Yeah, one hundred percent horniography.
00:35:59
Speaker 3: That’s I know, I know when I see it.
00:36:04
Speaker 4: Sorry, continue, I just got so damn excited, so I think, but I think what that does is in and of course, like when we when you take that scenario where we’re focused on the males, and then we think about like what has happened, for example, in places like Texas. We we often think like Texas and line breeding and the various things that they do to get males to grow these just ridiculous sized antlers at a very young age. And there is a genetic element to that. But I think that’s part of what’s just translated to us is well, of course, if there’s big antlers in this area and not in this area, there’s better genetics over here for antlers, then there is over over in this other area. So what what we did to better understand what what aspects of genetics versus nutrition go into producing large antlers is I think it’s fortunately like one of the most I think elegant experiments that I’ve ever been able to be a part of, and that is some work we did in South Dakota. And with that work, we had animals in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota, which had historically been known to grow some impressively large white tail deer. A number of Bars and Custer and other places that have just stupid big white tail deer, but more recently in the past number of decades, they’re all very small, like we just don’t grow big deer in that region anymore, versus in eastern South Dakota, where we can grow impressively big animals as little as three to four years of age. And so the looming question with that, and it presented the situation to evaluate what you reference directly, and that is, are those animals in southwestern South Dakota and the Black Hill is just genetically different than animals from eastern South Dakota. So we did what we call a common garden experiment, brought those animals into captivity as new born fawns. So we captured animals from the Black Hills in eastern South Dakota as newborn fawns, fed them, put them on a high nutritional plane. So we we bottle raised them as fawns, put them on a high nutritional plane, so we basically maxed out nutrition. Nutrition wasn’t limiting in any way, and then raise those animals all the.
00:38:17
Speaker 1: Way up to adulthood.
00:38:19
Speaker 4: And ad adulthood animals from on average, so once they hit peak body mass antler size animals from the Black Hills. Males from the Black Hills were seventy pounds smaller than males from eastern South Dakota and had forty inches of less antler than animals from eastern South.
00:38:41
Speaker 1: Because of bad genetics.
00:38:42
Speaker 4: Because of bad genetics, right, and so rate surface level right, Well, they’ve been on good nutrition since the day that they were born, and so clearly that that supports a genetic explanation.
00:38:54
Speaker 1: Then at that point.
00:38:56
Speaker 4: Case clothes which then we then took that one step further and looked at the next generation of animals born in captivity. So we had Black Hills males and females, allowed them to breed males and females from eastern South Dakota. So no local bucks jumping over the fence, no local bucks jumping over the fence. No, we allowed them to breed within their groups from all the animals that we’d raised since newborns, and then raised that second generation of animals all the way up to adulthood. And so once that second generation of animals were raised all the way up to adulthood, if we just consider the Black Hills animals, those sons born to those Black Hills males that I was just talking about. Those sons were had thirty inch more antlers than their fathers and were fifty pounds heavier than their fathers, indicating they made up over seventy percent of the difference that occurred between the first generation animals that we brought into captivity. We didn’t do anything genetically genetics from those those two groups of animals. What was different was the mothers from the animals that were now born in captivity, that second generation of animals, those mothers are on a high nutritional plane. Now, if we go back to the wild scenario, when we originally got those animals, the mothers in the Black Hills were on a poor nutritional plane. Ponderosa Pine dominated for us crappy understory, just on a poor nutritional plane. So that what that means is called the negative maternal effect. What that means is that those animals that we originally got as newborns.
00:40:35
Speaker 1: From the Black Hills.
00:40:37
Speaker 4: Carried the nutritional signature of mom who was living in the Black Hills, and now our new animals that are born in captivity, they’re now carrying the nutritional signature of the moms that they’re born to in captivity and those moms are on a high nutritional plane and there’s there’s almost no I mean, when you think about that level of difference, I mean, we’re talking fifty pounds difference in body mass, thirty inches of antler Like, it’s it’s it’s pretty wild to think that we could, through some genetic manipulation in a natural setting, obtain that level of difference. And here we’re talking over a single generation of animals, those massive increases in both body size and antlers that are attributed exclusively to nutrition of mom while those young were in utero.
00:41:29
Speaker 1: And so.
00:41:31
Speaker 4: And even like there’s been a number of studies that have been done in Texas from some colleagues of mind down there where they’ve you know, gone to great links to manipulate genetics by within enclosures, by taking you know, helicopter catching males and then and then calling males that weren’t meeting the level of size that they were working to obtain and are basically unable to obtain like a positive change in antler growth time through that level of very directive, very selective calling. So when you think about that, when we translate that to like one area to the next. Then what that what that can mean is that and there’s two sides of it. One, each set of these animals is adapted to their local environment. Not every environment has has or offers supreme nutrition. Right, So if we consider placing the arid desert to you know, a migratory meald deer populations that’s running up into the high alpine and you know, eating tall forb, tall forbes all summer long. So all these animals and or you know, in the arid system, maybe their winters aren’t so bad so that it doesn’t take it much for them to persist through winter, versus the animals that are in the more temperate systems in the in the mountains, like it’s harder for them to persist through winter. And so even if you just consider that at the surface level, not not all of those animals can and just operate and do the same thing. The way in which they operate, their way in which they obtain and allocate resources has to be adapted to that local environment. So there’s a side of that that’s influencing antler size that we see from one place to the next, But it’s also a reflection of that local adaptation to nutrition they have present there, and their ability to allocate resources to antler development versus other things. So certainly when you consider like males in one region to the next, or males in a harvest from one area to the next. Like if we’re going to compare apples to apples and say there’s bigger males here, smaller males here, we first need to of course consider what age classes of males are there. Right, If they’re mostly two and three year olds versus over here, you know there’s less harvest and they’re mostly being harvested at four to four to seven, we’re going to see differences in antler size. But once we’ve accounted for that, nutrition in what we see from one place to the next is going to play a much bigger role than genetics from one place to the next, And most of that nutrition and what dictates what a male is going to be for the rest of his life is mom and Mom’s condition, the condition you yep, So I think what’s fascinating about that is then what we see and even as we see from one year to the next, well, we can see fluctuations in antler size given environmental potential from one year to the next food growth, spring condition, summer conditions, winter conditions for that matter, from one year to the next. The greatest marker of what a male carries with him actually came before he was even dropped on the ground.
00:44:36
Speaker 1: Yeah. That’s a buddy mine in Wyoming, a guy that’s very very shrewd on wildlife and like a lifetime observer of wildlife he was. I didn’t get into it with him, but he’s talking about, uh, it’s a wet spring, right, anticipating good antler growth. He’s not wrong though, right. I mean that’s that is that is helpful. But you could also like a thing you wouldn’t hear from a guy, is a guy wouldn’t come and say to you two springs ago, correct? Would not? I saw a lot of fat, does yep? So I’m hoping to draw a tag this year in order to reap the benefits of that great nutritional season that those dolls were enjoying some time ago. It’s just not like part of the lingo, correct. Yeah.
00:45:36
Speaker 4: So, which is also important for us to be mindful of as hunters and even as conservationists when what we what we see today, for example, from yield of males or even size of males within a population in many instances isn’t a reflection of what happened then or what happened over the past couple of years. It’s actually a reflection of what happened maybe five years ago. And it’s in part, and it’s in large part because of the conditions that those males experienced from their mom while they were while they were in utero, and those and it’s called it, it’s called a cohort effect as well, where we may have years where that were just poor years or worse winters where moms were struggling in utero and they didn’t they lack the ability to give their young the silver spoon right out of the gate. And so that signal even if conditions improve later on in life, just like our example with the common garden experiment, even if condition for that male gets better after that spring and summer, he’s still going to carry the mark of mom mom’s nutritional signature with him for his entire life. So when that cohort of males gets to six years old, they’re going to carry that signature.
00:46:47
Speaker 1: And so especially when we see I wasn’t thinking it’s even more delayed, it’s even more delayed and so as we consider even ups and downs and fluctuations within populations, For example, we see reductions in density and we can talk about to with like bad winters, and then we see nutritional recovery within a population, meaning we have a bunch of fat moms that are able to you know, to plug into their offspring.
00:47:10
Speaker 4: I think what’s really interesting is oftentimes in periods of population growth, will then see you know, in a few year lag behind that is when we’ll see a number of very large males being harvested.
00:47:22
Speaker 1: And it wasn’t It wasn’t that again was the timeline.
00:47:25
Speaker 4: So if we if we see a dramatic reduction in a population, for example, and so that reduction is then tied to reduce competition for food, so nutrition, a big winter kill yep, so nutrition improofs for everybody else that remains.
00:47:38
Speaker 1: So does a big winter kill yep. Wipes out all the deer? Yeah, the twenty percent that are still stand and have gravy now yep, because they got all the good betting areas, they got the good feeding areas, Yeah, all to themselves.
00:47:49
Speaker 4: That’s competition for space and food. So nutritionally they’re far better off, which means they’re they’re meeting their needs, and then those females are able to invest allocate more resources to their offspring. So those offspring and we see this, see this in our in our work born bager grow quickly and then they’re carrying that positive nutritional signature with them. Right, We’re not going to realize that positive nutritional signature from a male harvest perspective until maybe four years down the road.
00:48:19
Speaker 1: Right, So that’s the thing in my little point I was making that it wasn’t even accounting for That’s correct, you’d have to be I’m excited about this year, yeah, because four years ago, Yeah, yep, there was some big some big fad do and then there’s exactly right.
00:48:34
Speaker 3: There’s kind of like two like countervailing forces then with a bagged winner, because I think like the traditional understanding is like there’s a bad winner and then you have to wait for the bucks to backfill, Like so the three year old deer, the old bucks die, the three year old deer become four year old deer, become five year old deer, and you see that sort of but then in a bad winter that those bucks that are born after the bad winner are going to have that limited potential for the rest of their life, but then the bucks born after that are going to have much better potential than the ones that died in the winter. So there’s like a there’s like a a stunned generation right before that generation that’s enjoying the more food at the trot that kind of thing.
00:49:22
Speaker 1: So we try to animate what Randall just said, I’ll get yeah, sure, well, like like I’m not I know, because you’re a very smart person.
00:49:34
Speaker 3: Thing.
00:49:34
Speaker 1: I know that you’re right, I just don’t understand what you’re saying.
00:49:37
Speaker 3: We should have a chalkboard in here.
00:49:38
Speaker 8: That’d be great, no, Like, you know, like the traditional I think, like the traditional very simplistic like logic about winter kill is that old bucks with worn down teeth are going to die and then that unit, if you’re just talking about like a unit, you’re saying, like, okay, that unit will be back on its feet by the time the younger.
00:49:59
Speaker 3: Bucks get to that age. And so it’s sort of this like linear like backfilling. But once those bucks get to that age, then you have the generation that we’re still in mom during that bad winter, So that generation is going to drop, and then the ones from the generations after that then they’re going to have even more food than anyone. So there’s almost like a delayed on set. There’s like a drop in potential and then a skyrocketing potential in terms of those cohorts.
00:50:34
Speaker 1: Does that make you think he’s sitting on a publication here.
00:50:37
Speaker 3: I don’t think that it’s nearly sophisticated enough to make make it a montieth shot paper.
00:50:44
Speaker 4: Well, so let’s let me I can essentially describe that with what we with what we observe with.
00:50:52
Speaker 1: I’m going to get out my markers the second time.
00:50:56
Speaker 4: With what we observed in the Wyoming Range, and so we’ll say I want to say before I get into that, like I mean, so we’ve been working in the Wyoming Range now since twenty thirteen.
00:51:05
Speaker 1: But can I can I a quick question I want to hear all about the wild Range. There’s one thing I want to clarify. Yep, because you kind of got at it, but I just want to make sure you get at it. Yep. Your job is not producing. Your job is your mandate is not to help hunters kill a huge box. Nah. Okay, so let’s clarify like that. I mean, like, like what is your sort of what gets you up in the morning. It’s not like guaranteeing hunters bigger bucks. Yeah no, okay, yeah, yeah, okay.
00:51:36
Speaker 4: Also, let’s sidestep and get some of those things and then I’ll swoop back to our deer work.
00:51:40
Speaker 1: In so.
00:51:43
Speaker 4: Our motto is advancing science and management, one day at one data point at a time. And so that even ties back to like the reference to our name and that our aim is to want advance science, which means I’m One way to think about that is our goal is to better understand what makes these animals tick, how they make a living within the world that they that they do, and then take that one from just like an ecological standpoint, better understand them, and then too, what does it mean for us from a management or conservation perspective. The reference to one data point as a time is we often joke like the amount of effort will put into one single data point because our work, our work is typically if we can pull it off, is long term and its individual base, and so that is we’re working to monitor individual animals for as long as we can. So a lot of studies like toss a collar on an animal, you know, monitor for a year or two and that’s it. Well, yes, we’re using callers, but we’re monitoring them for as long as we can, and we’re collecting a whole suite of other information.
00:52:46
Speaker 1: On them, generations of deal we are. Yeah, that’s exactly right.
00:52:50
Speaker 4: And so to do that, and so for example, like one animal in particular, it may take a lot lot of money and a lot of effort on our side of things from a field perspective to monitor that one animal, to collect the data point from that one animal. But sometimes that one animal is such a critical data point to better understanding how what makes those animals tick. And then if you take a whole bunch of those individual data points from animals and you pull them together, it allows you know, patterns to emerge for us as to what it means for those animals, notably, I mean, I get to I’m very fortunate to get to be the spokesperson to talk about our work a fair bit, but there’s so much that happens behind the scenes that I mean, I shouldn’t get any of the credit our funding sources.
00:53:37
Speaker 1: We can’t do what we do for free.
00:53:39
Speaker 4: And so like I’m we’re also constantly raising money to make to make that possible. But Wyomen Game of Fish Commission in particular has had a lot of foresight to support us in some of these long term studies. Groups like Merely Fanatic Foundation and Wildlife Natural Resource Trust and many others that have been the backbone that make it possible to do what we do. And then all of the fielder and now especially with the wym Game Fish Department, our central to our ability to be successful and support us in the field. And then I work with an amazing team of people in the shop, grad students, research scientists that pour their heart and their soul into the work we do the data collection that make all this possible. So I want to be able to at least give credit where credit is due. And then if any if I say anything stupid through the course of this, it’s totally on me.
00:54:28
Speaker 1: All the good things that are said, they should all get the credit for.
00:54:31
Speaker 3: And to put a finer point on this, like when you say one data point at a time, what you’re doing is catching animals by the dozen, and every single one of them. You’re taking temperature, you’re measuring fat, you’re swabbing the nasal passages, you’re ultrasounding for pregnancy, you’re measuring the size of the fetus. You’re I know I’m missing stuff there, but yeah, like I’ve gone on collaring or I guess to check in and collaring thing, and it’s I mean, it’s hands on and it’s very specific. It’s like how much does this animal weigh on this day of the year. So yeah, like I think just to bring it to a more concrete level, like you’re you’re measuring deer and handling deer the same deer in some cases for years.
00:55:20
Speaker 1: That’s great. Yeah, it be like a thing if you go back to the landscape of fear and will move on from the old times, we’ll talk about new ship. But if you go back to the landscape of fear, you Kevin explained that you put a collar on a dough, You put a collar on her fawon. Yep, you track her fawn through her whole life, put a collar on her phone. You’re starting to get a picture of where did that dough ever go? Where does the fawn ever go? That’s right, does the fon go to new places or the same places? When? What are what are the movement patterns? What are their sort of relative fitnesses? Because you’re able to look at like how fit was do a what’s the condition of herfon? What’s the condition of herfon? Yep? Right, it paints like an amazing picture. Yes, when you compare it to a different style of biology, might be like we flew it with a helicopter and did a count. Right, it’s just different. And I’m not dogging on that kind of work. There’s probably great work, but like to go like, well, let’s look at like a lineage, like let’s look at these like specific animals over a long period of time, and what can we tell about those specific animals that might inform what you’re seeing when you fly over a helicopter and count. That’s right, right, exactly, It’s like you’re adding a really important piece to a that can plug in or inform all these other methodologies. Yep, that’s exactly right.
00:56:47
Speaker 3: Like when I went with you, I mean it’s your students are your team members are like twenty thirty people all sleeping in the same forest service cabin, like rallying out into the field every day, resting, no drinking rule, wrestling deer and at night at night like someone’s making spaghetti and someone’s uh whatever you call it. When you spin the blood vile around.
00:57:12
Speaker 1: Centerfuge, centerfuge.
00:57:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it’s literally for a service cabin and someone’s making spaghetti and someone’s centerfuging meal.
00:57:17
Speaker 1: Deer blood and uh.
00:57:19
Speaker 3: And then everybody wakes up at five in the morning and rallies out again and a long day like in February and Wyoming just like someone’s got a clipboard and someone’s measuring deer and someone’s someone’s sampling stuff, and it’s just like it’s a it’s an impressive operation.
00:57:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:57:37
Speaker 4: Well, I and I think like even as you describe Steve the ability to see to connect those pieces together, which I hope is like more from like a mechanistic perspective, like how are these things happening?
00:57:50
Speaker 1: Why are these.
00:57:51
Speaker 4: Animals doing what they’re doing, the sort of the getting under the hood perspective as to what what it makes for each one of those animals to tick, and then as we see ailed that up, what that means for understanding what’s going on within the population. And that can’t happen with like a two year study, right, We’re talking many many years to be able to put that together in some of our goals with our work in the Wyoming range. So we’ve been fortunate to work there since twenty thirteen.
00:58:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, let’s talk. Let’s let’s set that up. We’ll talk. We’re gonna talk about a specific place. That’s right. So do you mind what is the Wyoming Range? Where are we talking about?
00:58:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Wyoming Salt River Range, Western Wyoming. And it’s uh, it’s home to what either is or has been one of the largest meal deer populations in the world, Region G.
00:58:37
Speaker 1: Region G. Yeah, like you might, and if you hang out on meal deer forums, yep, there’s a lot of talk about Region G and a lot of to talk about. Region G is a county speculating about its future, yes, talking about its challenges, anticipating what are going to be the good years the bad years. It’s a very Yeah, it is a very discussed unit. One of the reasons that’s probably true is because it’s like a unit that sort of occupies a distinct geographical feature. Yes, right, It’s like when you say Region G, you’re kind of talking about like a range, you know. It’s very elegant. Yes, and it is a probably in the top three or four mule deer spots that get discussed, like the Kaibab. I’m trying to think of the Henry Mountains in Utah, people like talk a lot about the agent G gets talked about and mourned, celebrated. Yes, yes, for sure, all of those.
00:59:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so that that population I mean is numbered a thought to have numbered, you know, beyond fifty thousand year, you know, once once upon.
00:59:52
Speaker 1: A time.
00:59:54
Speaker 4: And then kind of leaning into the ninety two ninety three winter was a time when they were thought to be well over fifty thousand deer within that herd. There was a lot of female harvest that was happening at that point in time to work to bring densities down because they were over over what game inficion define as the herd unit objective. The ninety two ninety three winter hit and the population crashed, and then since then it’s kind of fluctuated. I don’t know if we whether numbers matter or not, but maybe like thirty to forty thousand is somewhere somewhere in there and on the high end, yeah, and hasn’t risen to those levels previously and.
01:00:26
Speaker 1: What would be a low end since ninety two. So if let’s just let’s just accept I know you’re saying like maybe fifty thousand, Yeah, if we accept like around fifty thousand, ninety two low end since then, yeah, like it hasn’t hit that height again. So the new high end since then has been thirty forty.
01:00:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably mid mid thirties. What park has been like a low end the bottom. So I’m going to get to that eleven eleven thousand.
01:00:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:00:57
Speaker 4: So we started in twenty thirteen doing the things that we do is Randell describe to work to understand nutritional dynamics in the herd and then simultaneously just better learn more things about deer that we haven’t learned previously. From twenty thirteen, and this was out a time when maybe I forget the exact numbers, were probably bouncing around in the upper thirties, maybe around forty thousand. And from twenty thirteen to twenty sixteen, what we saw each year was just a general decline in body fat of females, both in March and in December, so autumn and spring body fat. It just declined from thirteen all the way up until twenty sixteen, and then in twenty sixteen seventeen we had a bad winter. We lost thirty percent thirty percent of our adult females pretty much all of our radio marked fawns, and so in going into the going into that winter, autumn fat at going into that winter was around seven percent. So think remember seven percent body fat. We lost thirty percent that year. Population rebounded began to rebound after that. Body fat of level levels of female shot way up. And then we had another bad winter in eighteen nineteen, lost thirty percent of our adult females again, and twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen nineteen. So the eighteen nineteen winter eight nineteen.
01:02:18
Speaker 3: Sorry, we’re working on a history product now, we’re thinking across centuries, right.
01:02:25
Speaker 4: So say the dates again. I’m sorry I was dumb. So you aad so win eighteen twenty nineteen. Yeah, so winter’s overlap calendar years, right, So sixteen seventeen winter, eighteen nineteen winter, two bad winters, roughly thirty percent of adult females. After each one of those years, we see upticks in nutritional condition following that, so body fat of females shoots up. After that, productivity eventually returns. There’s always a lag in a year because what ends up happening. This goes back to what you were referencing, Randall. So in those bad winters fawns because they’re they’re their their metal demands are different. They’re some of the smallest animals on the landscape and they don’t come into winter with much body fat. And this all comes down to allocation related principles, right, And so as a fawn, the energy you obtain is mostly going to grow. You don’t have a bunch of extra energy to put in body fat. Versus females. Adult females are done growing and whatever extra energy they have they can put into body fat.
01:03:27
Speaker 1: Or males.
01:03:27
Speaker 4: Part of the reason why we see age related dynamics and antler size or horn growth that we do goes to the same principle up until they reach a symptotic body mass and so are thus basically done growing in body size. We don’t see peak antler size until after that, and that’s all principle of allocation.
01:03:45
Speaker 1: Their first prioritizing.
01:03:48
Speaker 4: Body growth and then so even those age related dynamics, yes it’s age, but it’s founded in nutritional principles and how the resources they have and how they allocate energy. So even that’s driven by nutrition.
01:04:02
Speaker 1: I want to restate that point for people that are at work and they’re only half paying attention yeah. For me driving down the road listening to something. I’m listening to Clay’s Water, which an episode right now, which is fascinating. But I only catch half what he’s talking. Monks, I’m driving, So if you’re driving and you’re not, you’re only half listening. This is good. When the buck throws his I never thought about this far. When a buck throws his biggest antlers, he’s at a point where he’s seeing the least amount of body size growth year over year. That’s right. So he’s like growing his body grown, his body grown, his body grown, his body boom. He’s kind of what he is. And then he gets serious about antlers. That’s right, exactly, that’s right. Yep.
01:04:48
Speaker 4: So you can get back to work now, all right, all right, you’re getting so after after those winters, we see that, we see that up ticking body fat that occurred there after. But during those winters we lose almost all the funds. The females are in poor condition as they exit winter. And then what we see our spikes and stillborns after those bad winters. And yep, and we see suppressed birth mass after those bad winters as well, which again, yes, I’ll say this over and over again. But that has nutritional underpinnings as well for a mom. For these long lived iteroparous animals, which just simply means they live a long time and they reproduce multiple times through their lives, their best strategy is to have the opportunity to reproduce multiple times, as opposed to take one instance and pour all into reproduction, because then they’re likely to die. If they die, then they lose out on all those other opportunities to reproduce. So what that means for females that are in poor shape, it’s better for them to survive and for their offspring to die than it is for them to pour everything they have into their offspring and then compromise their own survival.
01:05:58
Speaker 1: So that’s part of why we see if she lives, she might crank out three more or whatever.
01:06:03
Speaker 4: Conditional will get better next number of years, and she’s gonna have the opportunity to try again. So we see increased still rates of still borning UH suppressed birth mass. Birth mass plays a huge role in whether or not they survive thereafter, and so what that means is you have high rates of still borning. In fact, in some of those years it’s like the leading cause of fund mortality after those bad winters, and so.
01:06:25
Speaker 1: And and that and that, just because like that fetus isn’t just it’s not getting fed, malnourished, essentially malnourished in the womb dies in the womb of malnourishment. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And they’re born dead. That’s north I never do. It makes total sense. It just never really thought about that. That has never thought about the fact that a dole would like get pregnant but then not have a fun right.
01:06:50
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, no, for sure. And I think to to sort of sidestep. I think it’s also important to point out for deer in particular, both white till deer and mule.
01:06:58
Speaker 1: Deer, they very early abort, so they will.
01:07:01
Speaker 4: Typically once they’re pregnant, they will carry they will almost always carry it to term, but then they may drop stillborn’s for example, in those in those years with those those bad conditions we have when it’s gotten really really bad in those bad winters, we have seen a couple of premature abortions that have occurred, but it’s very rare and deer.
01:07:22
Speaker 1: Okay, so she she birds it, she burns at the right time.
01:07:26
Speaker 4: Yep, but it’s still born, it’s dead, and so deer strategy is to typically carry the term, so they’re almost always pregnant. Twinning is very common, and then they’ll typically make those sort of like nutritional decisions of if they can do it once the young have hit the ground. And so that’s why we see that versus creators like prong horn or moose for example, where if things get really bad they may just they’re more likely to just abort on the way, or for creators like maybe elk well moose, elk sheep, we see nutritional signs is more strongly tied to like how fat they are and whether or not they’re going to be pregnant. So those those those things are evident along along the way regardless. What that means is we’re almost missing two cohorts of young. In those instances we lost the we lost the fawns in the bad winter. We lose a vast majority of the fawns that are born after the bad winter because of that nutritional suppression that has occurred. So there’s basically two cohorts. And so if you think, you know, from a hunting perspective, two cohorts, then that once those cohorts would have been four to six years of age. There’s not going to be a lot of animals in those age ranges because few of them actually made it through, and anyone that made it through, especially after the bad winter, when females are in such poor shape, they’re going to carry that nutritional signature of mom barely surviving through that bad winter, and so they’re going to be small regardless one they once they hit that age.
01:08:55
Speaker 1: Then, dude, I got it. I’m sorry, man, I got it. I got two questions. Okay. I I have to try to remember where I was. I don’t lose track. But no, no, no, I ask your questions. Write them down and write them down. Okay, Okay, now I feel like it just derailed you. I don’t know. I just got to write them down. Okay, okay, right now, not joking. I’m joking. Don’t me keep going and wait to ride them there? Uh? Okay, right now, the.
01:09:29
Speaker 6: Lamb, it’s almost as compelling as you’re reading news stories for the first.
01:09:36
Speaker 1: Okay, there’s off to Phil. Yeah, dude, listen, it’s just that what you’re telling me is so interesting to me. Okay, we’ll continue on, all right, all right, so after after the bad.
01:09:48
Speaker 4: Winners, there’s of course, there’s the there’s the flushing in well, actually, let me said stuff a bit. After those two bad winners, we had enough data where we can look at what determines whether or not female do you or survive bad winters. And there’s a few factors that are critical. Yes, the worse the winter is the lower probability to have to survive the winter. That’s intuitive, right. The more the better food, so like sage brush growth on their winter range, and in this in this range in sage brush is critical the core of their diet through winter. So more and better sage brush growth on their winter range helps them survive. Their ability to freely move on their winter ranges and just be able to move and access food on their winter range plays a role.
01:10:30
Speaker 1: Is that a function of snow?
01:10:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, in part a function of snow yep. And then we also see very strong age dependent relationships, So old females and so especially in a bad winter, we’re going to lose old females and then some of the very youngest ones. But otherwise, like that sort of prime age from say three to seven or so are pretty solid from an age perspective. But the other driving factor, in the most profound factor, is how fat they were going into that winter. Okay, So I think what’s important to considering that and the reason why it happens this way is if you consider why animals die on a winter and a bad winter, and you can you can almost translate this to like any sort of like environmental event that challenges them nutritionally, and that’s what a bad winter does. And for an animal to persist through the winter, it just needs to meet its energetic requirements through the course of the winter. And so as you pile up snow, that’s going to increase their nutritional deficit. Pile up snow and cold, right, so thermal regulate, cost to thermal regulate, maintain body temperature, cost to locomotion, wade through snow, and access food. And it’s also restricting food. It’s reducing their ability to access the food.
01:11:44
Speaker 1: So all of those.
01:11:44
Speaker 4: Things hamper their ability to meet their daily energy requirements. What fat does is it’s basically it’s as if they packed groceries on their back from summer range. And so if and if that’s one of the most profound factors that influences over winter survival, what it means is that over winter survival is largely dictated by what they experienced on a completely different range that could be one hundred miles away, and the food that they had access to there months earlier, and they’re bringing that with them to winter range and that’s helping ensure their survival over winter.
01:12:18
Speaker 1: That’s a fact you don’t consider.
01:12:19
Speaker 3: Either, not like how on the on a loan and some of these survival reality television shows, the contestants try to just pack on weight before they go out there.
01:12:29
Speaker 1: Got it, that’s my that’s mine. They’re going to take situation.
01:12:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you got to bring your reserves.
01:12:36
Speaker 1: Yeah I ain’t ready.
01:12:40
Speaker 4: Okay, So after and I think one one significant piece here is after those bad winters, we see the we see the upticks in in body fat that’s tied to that added precipitation. But those upticks in body fat stay even after that first year. It stays for a couple of different reasons. One reason is reduction in density, so fewer miles on the landscape, and that signature is profound within our data, and some many people don’t like to hear that, especially when it comes to deer. They may argue like, oh, density doesn’t doesn’t matter. We don’t want to hear that, But it’s true. The more miles that are on the landscape, the increase competition for food and that’s gonna have that’s going to result in lower body fat.
01:13:19
Speaker 1: And who doesn’t want to hear that?
01:13:21
Speaker 4: It depends well, so it depends upon the context of what it means for who doesn’t want to hear that. What the potential implications are of it is that And I guess we’ll either get to this now or more so later. But more is not always better. And much of our publics, for example, want more dear. We always want more deer, But more isn’t always better when you consider it from a nutritional perspective of what’s happening within a population and so and that that has been very evident within within the wyoming range with our data there and so increased precip fewer miles on the landscape, lower competition. What’s also interesting, and this this goes all the way back to our conversation of why we see, for example, even different antler capabilities of size from one place to the next from a nutritional perspective, But what we what we see after animals have gone through those bad winters. We evaluated what factors influence their gain and fat over the summer. And it’s all the things I mentioned. It’s it’s habitat, it’s pre sip, it’s density of density of deer on the landscape, it’s age, it’s whether or not you recruited, whether or not you lactated and recruited young. But the other thing is if you’ve experienced a bad winter and so in the past. Yeah, and so the animals that live through bad winters, we what we see within them is this slight shift and how they allocate their their body reserves over time.
01:14:53
Speaker 1: You’re kidding me, No, I’m not.
01:14:54
Speaker 4: I’m not at all, and to the point where they learn, Yeah, and not to not to like anti promorphized too much because it’s like it took it’s a physiological component. But what it is is, yeah, it’s an adaptation associated with this like subtle preprogramming, pre programming within the animals.
01:15:12
Speaker 1: That’s a slight shift.
01:15:13
Speaker 4: And we call it ressensitive reproductive allocation where the risk they allocate resources to reproduction in a risk sensitive way, right, and that risk is associated with what they’re going to experience there after. And again if they invest too much into reproduction, they’re risking their own survival, right, because they need reserves to survive. We have a bad winter that’s like life threatening and they barely make it. We see that shift in resensitive allocation to the level where there’s slight increases in body fat that we see if animals had experienced bad winter past, even after we’ve accounted for all all the other factors that are there.
01:15:52
Speaker 1: And it’s not like you know what I said, like they learn. It’s not that it’s not that they’re like, hey man, when when the weather gets bad, I got a little move. Yeah, rog ou don to old man Lawrence’s haystat right. It’s not that.
01:16:05
Speaker 4: No, it’s it’s like it’s physiological and I think what can also Maybe that sounds crazy, it’s not. There’s been some very elegant work and so so that work of mine was led by Taylor Lashar, and we drew from some prior work when we decided to investigate that idea from Board Barton, who was able to take semi domesticated reindeer in Norway and ones that were supplementally fed through the winter and ones that were not, and just by way of shifting them taking the supplementally fed ones and going to a natural pasture, or taking the ones that were from the natural pastor and going to supplemental feeding. Animals carried their signature of the range that they were on and how they allocated resources to reproduction, with the exception of those that went from supplemental feeding to the natural pasture, they instantly dropped how they allocated resources to reproduction because it was the potential it was a potentially compromising their ability to maintain themselves, which is which is the priority. So I liken it to like winter PTSD, these animals had this life threatening experience and there’s this subtle shift within their preprogramming and to support that further, and I worked with captive deer for almost a decade. You can have captive white tailed deer, any any captive ungulate for that matter, except for maybe domestic animals, and supplementally feed them the entire year, so they’re on the best nutrition all year round, and we still see cycles in their diet how much they eat in their body fat and body masks through the entire year, when technically, like they’re supplementally fed, it could just be constant through the whole year, but it’s not We see these natural rhythms, and so they voluntarily through the winter reduce metabolic rate, reduce appetite and how much they’re eating to go through those sites. And so I think the most I mean, maybe it’s like, Okay, that’s cool, so deer slightly reprogrammed after a bad winter. But I think what it also tells us is that animals are adapted to the local environment within the ranges, in the conditions that they experience, to the point where even within an environment like that, when we see this huge, huge shock to the system, we see animals adapting accordingly, and so that should help convince us that when we go from one range to the next, these animals are operating in ways that correspond with that range, so that they’re locally adapted, which is the same reason we see antlers the way in which we do females doing what they do. For example, females in the Wyoming range are not going to gain fat the same way that female deer in southeast Montana are going to different range, different environmental conditions, they need different things to be able to persist within that environment. So to go one step further, all these things happening with body fat, the reduction in density within the herd. Then we begin to enter into the twenty two to twenty three winter, which this is like, I don’t know, one hundred plus year winter, like while this winter that we’ve seen for decades within that country, we lost seventy percent of our adult females, all of our radio marked fams six all of them just all gone sixty five percent of our adult males. So man, yeah, that dropped the population to eleven roughly eleven thousand animals through the course of that winter. And I mean it was like animals were sort of like got so concentrated on the south facing slope in places where there’s like juniper but no food, the hedgeline, the brows line, and the juniper was like almost as tall as me, where they just all they would do is just walk these trails around around juniper, just eating whatever they could, sage brush, any sagebrush that was exposed, like the twigs, everything was eaten to the to the snow line. I mean, it was it was a very sad experiment experience in an incredibly, incredibly devastating winter in that regard for that deer population.
01:20:07
Speaker 1: I had as it’s probably connected to you, but a buddy mine has a property in Wyhoming and he was there were some researches that we’re doing little collaring work on his place. Or it feels he might even been talking about your outfit. It’s a Western Whoming. Anyways, he was playing. He was telling me how this guy was telling him that during that winter. He’s like, it was that there’d be moments, Yes, yeah, there’d be moments when the mortality signals were like bing bing bing bing bing. Yep. So like within this broad time of like really heard of prolonged period of intense hardship, there’d be like killing.
01:20:47
Speaker 4: Moments, yes, yeah, yeah, And so can you explain that a little bit?
01:20:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:20:51
Speaker 4: So again, this goes back to what we also talked about before, and that animals simply need to meet their daily energy requirements and fat helps with that during that winter. And I think this is just a really striking example of this. For females that entered winter, that entered that winter over fifteen percent that entered winter under fifteen percent body fat, we began losing them on February fifteenth, a female deer that entered winter over fifteen percent body fat, we did not start losing them till March fifteenth, a month later, which, like if you could just distill a bunch of data in a very simple manner, that’s incredibly telling to just be able to say that. So what that meant is that animals were very much on the nutritional edge and so they’re barely getting by. They’re barely meeting their daily energy requirements. And so as we would go through that winter, and that winter was very very cold as well, when we’d see storms come in or significant drops in temperature for a couple of days, we just see spikes in mortality. And that’s because what it’s done is they’re barely meeting their daily energy requirements. We see those those drops in temperature, their energy requirements go up because they’re needing to meet basal metabolic demands through the winter in that day and they just can’t do it, and so they die. And so that’s where those spikes and mortality came from during that period of time. Now, what I think is very also very important and incredibly revealing to the work that we’ve done there specifically with regards to bad winters. And if we go back to the sixteen seventeen winter, the eighteen nineteen winter, the recovery, the recovery in nutritional condition, so body fat that occurred thereafter, and in part again because of the signals of the bad winter, but also the reduction and density on the landscape so fewer mouths to feed. We entered the twenty two to twenty three winter at over twelve percent body fat. So if you remember, do you remember what we entered the sixteen seventeen winter, seven percent, So that’s a that’s a huge difference. Entered seven percent during the sixteen seventeen winner, we lost thirty percent of our females. Twenty two twenty three winter way way worse than the sixteen seventeen winter. We ran Taylor ran our survival models for the twenty two to twenty three winter based on a seven percent body fat level. So had we started at seven percent going into the twenty two twenty three winter, we would have lost over ninety percent of our deer population. No kid meaning yeah, yeah, we go back to sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen. The reductions in deer density, the recovery and body fat that occurred thereafter those winters saved us in the twenty two to twenty three winter. Had we come into the twenty two twenty three winter at those lower levels that we were experiencing previously, prior to those former bad winters, we probably would have lost essentially everything. Meaning if we go back to the more is not always better perspective, especially in that I mean, that’s the very clear demonstration of more is not necessarily always better from a nutritional perspective.
01:24:03
Speaker 1: In that way.
01:24:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you if you had more deer going into that winner, it’s not the case that more deer would die, but it would be proportional. You’d actually have a higher proportion. If you had more deer on the landscape, you’d have a higher proportion that would die. That’s correct than if you had fewer deer going into it.
01:24:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah. Hmm, God’s great, man, I mean it’s bad. It’s interesting when I say great, I mean it’s great. What happened to the deer saying it’s a great Oh yeah, yeah, with the input of information, I don’t know, just like understanding.
01:24:41
Speaker 4: Yeah, there’s a lot of power in that. Just like that scenario and how it played out for us. I mean, the winters, the winter’s basically presented to us a huge experiment or treatment effect essentially based on like the severe the severe nutritional limitation and then the massive reduction and see that occurred with that.
01:25:02
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, we were doing the work that we were when we were doing it.
01:25:05
Speaker 4: Otherwise we’d still just we’d still be talking about like how bad winters are, and they are bad, but what does it mean for the population? And even this notion that like you know what happens on a winter range, we see it, right, It’s very evident to us these animals die on winter range. But at the same time, one of the major reasons why they’re dying is because of what they experienced during the summer and if whether or not they brought enough reserves with them from summer range.
01:25:31
Speaker 3: And I just thought about, sorry, go ahead, I was gonna say, and all that stuff would be invisible unless you had those very individual, that’s correct data points, right, Like you’re not going to pick that up from not to poke at the helicopter people, but you’re not going to pick that up from an aerial survey, like it’s a very intimate knowledge of specific animals.
01:25:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you’re going to I mean, you’re going to see the level of loss.
01:25:55
Speaker 3: Right, but you’re not going to see the underlying.
01:25:57
Speaker 4: No, and to be able, you know, for our ability to be able to do that, Like we know how old each animal is, we know the fact that they brought with them this from summer range, we know where they lived on summer range, and we can connect and build all those pieces together, which also not only allows us to tell those stories, but tell a number of our other stories associated with how.
01:26:16
Speaker 1: Animals learn to migrate. What does it mean for them?
01:26:19
Speaker 4: What does it mean for the reproductive chronology and their cycle through the year, and those sorts of things. Unless we have those repeated samples and the things that we’re measuring, we lack the ability to be able to paint that picture. And so that deer that you talked about at the beginning, that really small male, he was born. He was born in twenty seventeen, so he was born after the sixteen seventeen winter. And yeah, all day long, in fact, I mean even as for the potential of antler growth that exists within the Wyoming range, I mean.
01:26:50
Speaker 1: All day long.
01:26:51
Speaker 4: When he was three years old, I mean, I would have said, and I think that’s kind of what you’re referencing to Steve. I would have called him he’s either a large yearling or a small.
01:26:59
Speaker 1: Two year old. I would have said it in a declarative fashion. And he’s three, and he’s three three and a half years old, and I would have also said, I can tell you what he is now. My abilities fall apart when they get up to be like four or five six years old, but one hundred percent what you’re looking at right.
01:27:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely absolutely, Okay, can is it time now?
01:27:24
Speaker 1: Because this is the benefit of being the host, get the indulgent a series of very fast questions. I want to more information, Okay, hot tip. Yeah, you should start a tag service where it’s predictive modeling and you sell to people tips.
01:27:46
Speaker 4: Be like, I would be looking very seriously X in four years. I think meat eaters should just hire us and meat eater should offer that service thing.
01:28:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s called the Monteith Labs or monte Text Meat Eater. Okay, we’ll do that. Okay, okay, not a quick question, yeap. Theod Amy and my boy are driving down the road, my older boy, and there’s all these sirens and paramedics running around, and we stopped well shy by take my binoculars and look, and I see something quite startling. There’s a wrecked motorcycle. There’s seven firefighters and paramedics working on a man who’s like splayed out on the road. And there’s a demolished fawn. I don’t know, no idea the guy lived or not tried to miss a fawn hit The fawn was a mess on the road. Two days later, we drove down that road and there’s a dough still standing there, like one hundred yards away, but looking agitated. Three o’clock in the afternoon, she’s still on her feet, looking like agitated, down in the ditch. When you with your are you able to ever able to pull out of your data sets? What that relationship’s like? Like she has a stillborn? Does she still hang around? Does she immediately walk away? Do you know what I mean? When she loses a fond what is the sort of there’s no way to measure grief. Yeah, but like when does she go like huh, I guess it’s time to move on? Yeah?
01:29:31
Speaker 4: Interesting question and highly variable from one individual to the next. In most instances with stillborns, though we can suspect even just via their GPS data around the birth event, whether or not they had stillborns, because they tend to peace.
01:29:44
Speaker 1: Out pretty quickly. She knows what happened. Yeah, that’s exactly right.
01:29:48
Speaker 4: And also many females like they if they lose one of their young later on to whatever reason, rarely do they stick around.
01:29:57
Speaker 1: They will often leave.
01:29:58
Speaker 4: However, there are a handful of females that are just their motherly nature, whatever that is, may may be there and even defending the carcass. Still when when we arrive very typically within twenty four hours by the time when we’re working to get in there, but quicker than that, Yeah, yeah, they’re gone by the time when we get in there.
01:30:23
Speaker 1: Yep, got it, yep, exactly. Uh, here’s an observation when you’re talking about this this thing of like gaming out, how much energy am I going to put into this offspring? Uh it’s implied, but but just to point to an example of something entirely different, Like think about a Pacific salmon when they go they’re going, Yeah, I mean, John, I mean like like kings can kind of delay, a king salmon can delay. He doesn’t have to stay to a set schedule, you know, he can whatever his body will make a decision like, nope, not going to go. That’s why you get huge kings, right, that’s why you get you could get a seventy pound king because for whatever reason, for a number of years it didn’t click on and it didn’t run. But these other sam of around a set schedule. It’s like I’m going, buddy, I hope the river’s right. I hope the river’s right because it’s happening. Question if I took a deer, If I took a buck from Iowa, Okay one hundred and eighty inch white tail from Iowa two hundred plus pounds, one hundred and eighty inch handlers, and I brought him down and put them in Who’s dear country? And Sonora, does he just die?
01:31:44
Speaker 4: Cus deer country? And scenario probably die. He just dies because his pattern Cou’s deer. Did you say I’ll fight you over it?
01:31:57
Speaker 1: Because his groove his like sister, the yeah just isn’t going to translate. That’s right, Okay, that’s right. Yep. Uh. This one’s controversial to what you need to answer. Yeah, they look in your face. I just wonder about like is it even possible, Like what if you went and looked at human fitness, human physical fitness. Does some of the stuff is some of the stuff relevant. People don’t like to do that kind of stuff, but.
01:32:26
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there’s there’s a substantial amount. And of course I don’t nutrition. Oh yeah, okay, there’s lots of evidence within human human medicine associated with maternal nutrition. Yes, that ties that translates over a generation. Yeah, absolutely, God, that’s all my questions and humans as well.
01:32:47
Speaker 1: Okay, that’s all my questions.
01:32:50
Speaker 4: Maybe a couple a couple other things related related to some of these ideas. One of them, okay, So the other thing that we saw after a couple of those bad winters is on winter range, we tried to keep our same animal distribution over time, roughly, so if we lose animals, we work to go back in and recatch adult females from that same general area.
01:33:11
Speaker 1: To keep the same number cooking.
01:33:13
Speaker 4: Yep, yeah, exactly, roughly seventy adult females is part of that is what is with that study. As we were going back to some of the areas where we had routinely caught deer in the past and wanted to replace them, we couldn’t find any. There was none in there. After those two bad winters, and so it got us scratching our heads. Okay, what does that mean? Did those bad winters just cause animals to like, yeah, I’m not living here anymore and shift out of that country when they were pushed by the bad winter because of snow conditions. Did they then find a new place that was better and then stay there or did they just die and they’re not there anymore? So we evaluated that question. And while certainly there are signals, you know, animals can be displaced a bit by a bad winter, which also interesting though, is a stronger signal of that displacement is if animals had a bad winter the prior year, and so again it’s like this win this winter PTSD. The shift from where they had lived previously tends to occur after the bad winter, as opposed to during the bad winter. So it’s like the memory of the bad winter results in a shift from when they would normally winter because because Meal.
01:34:21
Speaker 1: And they’re like, but I’m sticking it out, but next year I’m going somewhere else.
01:34:25
Speaker 4: That’s that’s exactly right, because Meal they’re incredibly faithful. They’re incredibly faithful to the winter range, to their summer range, into their migratory route do the same thing year after year as adults, and so they they they they shift the winter PTSD shift after the bad winters. But what we learned from that work in particular, was that the reason why we ended up with these vacant holes on winter range was because animals died and we lost them. And remember, one of the key factors that influences whether or not they live or die through winter is how fat they were. So what that means means is what we observe on a winter range with regards to population distribution. For example, Yes, it’s influenced by what happens there during winter, but it again is dictated by what happens during summer. So summer nutrition, where animals go and their summer nutrition plays a huge influence in winter distribution of animals.
01:35:20
Speaker 1: But they’re making like that, they’re making a mistake. What do you mean they’re making a mistake. They’re not not the hack on them, They’re not thinking it through. They shouldn’t. Okay, what’s the what’s the thinking they’re blaming? What would you do? No, No, I’m not I’m joking. I’m not joking. Yeah, it’s summer range. It’s like it has a poor experience on summer range, goes into a season with low body fat six percent, goes to winter range, has a terrible winter on winter range. Its response could possibly be I need to find a new summer range. Oh yeah, but it’s blaming the winter range.
01:36:06
Speaker 4: You did this on purpose, beautiful segue. So they don’t find a new summer range. These animals are These animals are incredibly faithful to their world as adults, and so they don’t go find a new summer range. They just they go back up and do the same thing year after year. So then what that then relates to, I have two things I need to get to make sure I get to. One is reproductive chronology. The other the other is what it means across generation of animals. So what that means in that scenario and how that plays out is why did that animal end up with that summer range and why did it end up with that migratory route. We know and have known for a bit now that once once they have their routes as adults, that it’s functionally a trade of the animal that it possesses, kind of like even even saying that this animal is really dark colored, Well, this animal has a forty five mile migration at Summer’s in Deer Creek and it winters down in Nugget Canyon. Like it’s practically a trade of the animal because that’s what it does. So then the question is how did it get there? Why did that animal end up with that? And so the other thing we’ve been working on doing is understanding the only way to get to that is to start from day one from an animal when the day it was born, and then follow it alongside mom as you were describing early on. And so we’ve been working to do that to test this question of ontogeny migration or like how do they learn to migrate? Where does it come from? And so, which is also very hard when you have so many bad winters because it wipes out all your young animals that you’ve been trying to monitor alongside mom. But we’ve at least gotten to the point despite the bad winters that we’ve had sixteen mother daughter pairs that we’ve been able to monitor from daughters growing up to be three years of age to the point where they’re reproductively active. Of those sixteen, eleven of them adopted Mom’s migratory route, so they basic do the exact.
01:38:00
Speaker 1: Same thing that mom does.
01:38:03
Speaker 4: Five however, and this sort of gets back to what you were alluding to. Five however, changed things up and did something differently. What’s interesting in that is that those there’s almost there’s not even really like a continuous gradient of like this one definitely did like rate on top of Mom’s route, and then you know, weekends, weekends, weekends, And then we have some that basically don’t adopt Mom’s route. It’s either like you do the vast majority of it, or you don’t at all got it. And so there are a handful of young females that disperse and do something differently. They find a different migratory route, and so there are a number of them that do things differently, but not as adults. Adults is pretty fixed. The young animals, a few do it, but the ones that do change it seems like whatever they do during their yearling year, so when they turn one year of eight is what they then end up doing for the rest of their lives. Like that’s what establishes it. What’s also really interesting and is not what I would have expected, which again, our sample size is only sixteen.
01:39:10
Speaker 1: We have more to go here to be able to get there to do this.
01:39:14
Speaker 4: But the ones that adopted a different migratory route, much to my surprise, they largely clung to what where they lived on summer range, but then migrated to a different winter range. And I would have thought it would have been the opposite, especially with regards to what you just said, we’ll go somewhere else to summer. The majority of them are still residing close to their natal range where they were born, but they adopt a different migratory route and go to a different winter range, which I’m not entirely sure what to make of that yet, but that’s that’s what we’ve seen.
01:39:52
Speaker 3: So you’re saying, at sort of the yearlink stage, that’s the pattern that they adopt for the rest of their lives.
01:39:57
Speaker 1: Are they.
01:40:00
Speaker 3: Is there any correlation to like if the mother dies before they turn one, you know, like yep, are more of those deer likely to be these sort of pathfinders or what’s the relationship there?
01:40:14
Speaker 4: Very good question, which we’re only looking at sixteen at the moment, But in looking at those sixteen there seems to be no relationship to whether or not mom dies or mom lives. That seems to not play a role at least as of as of yet. But to then take that to the level of like why we see deer where we do, how they get there, all of these pieces with which determines why animals live where they do and the success that they have for deer anyway, it all starts such early in life. It’s a cross generational process. Clearly that we need to be able to document document from them. And one, maintaining migration is clearly something that translates across generation as young learned from mom. But two and so that means we’re you know, we’re also conserving memory on a landscape. But two also I think the few animals that did something different maybe is like a glimmer of hope that you know, when things are lost. So if we lose certain migratory routes, how do we get them back? Is the question, because if everybody’s faithful to what they know, then nobody’s going to go back there. And I firmly believe with what we’ve been able to learn about meal deer over the past fifteen or so years, that something that is hampering us, or has hampered us from the past to the present is when we’ve lost certain animals across the landscape that migrated into certain places before. I mean, there’s you know, many people can say, man, there used to be deer all over this ridgeline, and I just don’t see deer here anymore. And they may reference a number of reasons why they think that is. They may reference it as an elkhole. Now it’s full of elk, or whatever the case may be. But the reason why they potentially don’t come back is because the only way to get that backfilled is for animals to be pioneers and venture out into new range, which adults tend not to do. And so we’re relying on the small proportion a few yearlings to potentially regain that space. And if we lose this is that you know, vacant space Randall. We’ve you know, talked about a bunch as well. If we lose occupancy of those places on the landscape over time, for whatever reason, we lose memory to those places. What that’s doing is it’s functionally reducing the carrying capacity of the range. If you don’t have animals using it, it technically doesn’t matter, and maybe viable habitat that’s there, but for it to matter to the population, somebody needs to be using it and integrating that food into the into the population.
01:42:41
Speaker 1: That’s so interesting because you look at places like that and you’re like, what is it about it that that’s not Why don’t they like it? That’s right?
01:42:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that’s what we think. Yeah, why aren’t they going here? Well, nobody knows to go there, and so how do you get them? How do you get them back in there?
01:42:55
Speaker 1: You know, salm and there’s a sorry randall and salmon. Some percentage of a run I always say they screw up, but it’s some some percentage of it. Run doesn’t go back to the natal stream. They screw up end up somewhere else. But think about the implications of it. Yeah, because river systems change. I mean, there could be a river that doesn’t have suitable spawning gravel and then a flood whatever landslide on something and all of a sudden boom, it’s great, some number of fish, some fish is gonna like some number are going to screw up and go up that thing and then it could be could be something gold mine. It’s a portfolio, just place a sweet portfolio effect. And also you create a new right and think about like the thing I always want to think about that too, is like as as climate changes, Yeah, there’s a lot of salmon rivers that would be great salmon rivers, but there too far. North’s too cold, right, So as because you had that dispersal mechanism, things could just suddenly become kind of right, that’s right, and some fish is going to take a left when he should have taken it right and wind up finding a new exactly. It takes two but you follow me, yeah, just yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I got a technical question for you if I see it. Let’s say a fellow sees a nice buck on the last day of season, Say it’s November night of fellas, he’s a nice buck on November twenty fourth, so you know, no one got him. He could die from other stuff. But the next year, on November twenty fourth, in your mind, how far is that dear from where he was the year before, based on your based on your research, all depends it does. Yeah, but he’s already an adult, he’s already set in his.
01:44:56
Speaker 4: Ways so best. So we’re working on understanding those aspects of males as well. Male dispersal from their natal range, how faithful they are to their seasonal ranges as well, and yeah, I mean in general, as you as you noted, they’re living within their within their range, right, and so I think that the certainly not that far from there. He lived up in that country, right. The only wild card within that is during a hunting season, as males get potentially pushed around, he may have been in a non normal place than what he often is the one year that he’s seen versus versus the next year. But certainly, yeah, I could have generally he was in a spy he don’t want to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s that’s exactly right. But otherwise he you know, he lives in that country, so yeah, they’re there.
01:45:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, when you’re talking about re restoring a lost migration corridor on this habitat, like because you’re it’s a it would be a yearling of yearling with some wander lust that takes off down a new ridge or whatever else. There aren’t going to be any other deal that then convert to that range. It’s all going to come from that deer’s offspring, correct.
01:46:05
Speaker 1: Most likely.
01:46:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it’s a long to cross generation you’re talking about, but multiple multiple generations before you have like a herd of deer using that.
01:46:15
Speaker 4: That’s right, which reinforces the importance of maintaining what you have because you are maintaining and protecting memory on the landscape. And if once we lose it, especially for a such a faithful animal like a deer, we don’t we don’t necessarily get it back, just like that versus elk, where they’ll just go go anywhere, they’ll take advantage of whatever happens to be there. But for deer, their memory is like their fence around their world of what they do. And I think another thing that I think, I think this is just super interesting and I think speaks to the level of intimacy between animal, female deer and their environment is that if you consider mule deer, who all share a common winter range, Okay, some migrate ten miles, some grade one hundred and twenty miles. The one that my rates one hundred and twenty miles is typically often going to be going to higher elevation, potentially traversing a lot of country, dealing with snow conditions and spring stuff like that in an ideal world. And for meal deer, they want to go back and give birth to the range they typically give birth in. We’ve literally had female deer give birth in the exact same bedsite one year after the next. I mean, they’re very faithful to their birth sits. So then the question is, well, what does that mean for them to time birth to coincide with when food is available on their summer range and for their ability to get to their summer range to give birth. And so we looked at that in as we talked earlier, we not only see animals on the day they’re bone, but we also see them in utero. So when we recatch females in March, we see the fetuses in utero and we measure their eye diameter, which gives us an indication of how far along in gestation they are. So we’ve been able to put those pieces together to look at what factors influence eye diameter in March, so that gestational progression, what determines where they are in March, and then what does that mean thereafter Because one of the strongest signals that determines when animals give birth is how far along they were in gestation in March, So we can use fetal eye diameter. In fact, we use it to help guide our planning in the spring when we’re going to catch mule, deer fonds or bigcorn sheep lambs. The anticipation of who’s going to give birth when we use fetal eye diameter that we measured in March.
01:48:29
Speaker 1: But that’s like fine tuning within a pretty narrow window.
01:48:32
Speaker 4: Though to some degree for sheep it can be pretty broad. But for deer, yes, it’s fine tuning within a narrow window. That said what we so we then looked at so since fetal eye diameter plays such a major role in when they give birth, we looked at factors that influence fetal eye diameter. Uh and I think one of the most fascinating aspects that influence fetal eye diameter is how far they migrate. So animals that migrate further have smaller eye diameter in March than those that migrate short distances, if that may. So the ones that migrate short distances are further along in gestation in March, which means they’re going to give birth sooner to be that’s right. That’s right, and greenup is going to happen faster on that range than the range that’s way up in the mountains. So in it the influence is roughly for every ten miles migration migrated. Based on our models, for every ten miles migrated, that’s one day behind in gestation. So for an animal that basically hardly migrates to an animal that migrates one hundred miles, can be ten days expected differences based on their feetal eye diameter from when they’re going to give birth. That animal that migrates one hundred miles is going to give birth ten days later. Now to take that one step further, and this happened, I forget the exact year. It is twenty twenty. On June second, I was with one of my team members, Ran and Jacobak and we went into deer ninety six, up into where she gave birth that morning, collared her twin fawns, and then we went on and did other work the rest of the day, and then we got a birth notification from a vagineal implant transmitter later that evening. We were about two hours before before dark and we’re looking at it and the animal that we just got a birth notification from was about three hundred yards down from where we had just been that morning collaring twin fonns from ninety six, And I’m like, man, wouldn’t be cool to hustle in there to see if we can call her. Like, two animals give birth on the same day that live in the same place, So we hustled in there and then collared the single fond from that female on that same day. So which makes sense, right, animals living in this same area giving birth on the same day. So ninety six was the one that was up the ridge, and then it was MFO that was down.
01:50:49
Speaker 1: Below the ridge.
01:50:50
Speaker 4: Now we had three years earlier, in spring of twenty seventeen, we had collared mfoh who had just been born to ninety six in that same place on June third, So I.
01:51:07
Speaker 3: Got lost, mom and grandma are giving mom and daughter.
01:51:10
Speaker 4: So MFO who we went in that afternoon to call her fone was ninety six’s.
01:51:16
Speaker 1: Daughter from three years prior.
01:51:18
Speaker 4: Oh, really really ninety six’s daughter from three years prior, giving birth on the exact same day on June second, and.
01:51:28
Speaker 1: Three hundred yards down the hill.
01:51:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly same place, same birth date. And also she had been born one day difference in the calendar three years prior. So and while that’s like seemingly an anecdote, we’ve seen it and had it happen multiple times. Within these family groups, which indicates to us that not only are is space on the landscape, migratory routes on the landscape inherited across generational time, but even their reproductive synchrony, the reproductive chronology is inherited across generational time. Like that’s how in sync they are with their environment. And now I think what’s also equally facinating if you consider how the mule deer rut happens, not all of it, but a lot of it happens down to winter range, right, they migrate down to winter range, and so on winter range, we have all these animals with all these different migratory tactics that are showing up on winter range, and they’re all rutting in this same place. And then but what it means is what’s happening is Gladys over here, who migrates ten miles, she you know, she comes into Estris on November twentieth. But then Jennifer over here, who migrates one hundred miles, she doesn’t come into Estris until ten days later on December first. Right, even though they’re on the same winter range in the same place, their estra cycle is tied to actually where they go during the summer and it has virtually nothing to do with where they’re at on that day on winter range.
01:52:57
Speaker 1: Damn. Yeah. Besides seeing a lot of stuff that dudes say, do you see things that state game agencies are doing or the way they’re thinking about these issues? And management? Do you see things that you’re like that just doesn’t make any sense. You’re you’re wanting me to like step on a landline? Yeah, I would like that.
01:53:29
Speaker 3: How far? How long does it take for the management to catch up with the science?
01:53:34
Speaker 1: And are you a communication with everybody? Well?
01:53:37
Speaker 4: So, no matter there’s one challenge with all of this, right, no matter what, we’re all we’re all people, and we’ve all we’ve all done things a number of different ways, and we’ve just accepted them to be true over time without necessarily pausing and saying, wait, why do I think that? Where did that come from? What evidence support it?
01:53:58
Speaker 1: And it just do I think the screaming my kids all the time? Yeah? Yeah, is helping. That’s exactly right, and help with me.
01:54:04
Speaker 4: I mean, so a fascinating example that like when I grew up in I mean grew up in northeastern South Dakota and we hunted deer every year, white tail deer every year, just locally there to feed our family. And my dad and my grandpa always used to say, like, man, the deer fat this year. I guess we’re going to have a bad winter. Like they would say that.
01:54:24
Speaker 1: Over and over again.
01:54:26
Speaker 4: And I mean I remember as a kid thinking, wait, how do they know it’s going to be a bad winter? How do they know to prepare for a bad winter? And the thing is we know now like they don’t like that that is is technically not the case, although if you consider it relative to local adaptation and then the example that we just talked about with this pre programming and allocation of reserves after experiencing a bad winter, there’s simultaneously some truth to that because it’s tied to what animals have experience. Maybe less so of knowing they’re going to experience something, but it’s it’s a social it was happened in the past, and so I think there’s just many things that we operate within that we just we generally don’t question. This is just how we do things, and so that’s that’s where we go. That’s where we go. And so there’s there’s always there’s always some you know some challenges in rethinking where we have been and being willing to reconsider new information.
01:55:23
Speaker 1: I think that’s hard.
01:55:23
Speaker 4: That’s hard for anybody, being diplomatic probably, And the thing you.
01:55:29
Speaker 1: Sometimes look at management strategies and management practices and think to yourself, it just doesn’t make any sense.
01:55:40
Speaker 4: Well, sure, okay, sure, But I can also like there there’s also and I mean with full respect for my for my colleagues with management agencies, like, we’re also stuck in this difficult position where it’s not necessarily difficult position, but they manage a while resources in trust right fundamental aspect of the North American model. We’re all owners of it, but it’s managing it as a trust on behalf of the public. And so what that means is they don’t get to just sit in a room and just say, well, here’s what we’re going to do because biologically this is the best thing to do.
01:56:15
Speaker 1: They also have to consider.
01:56:16
Speaker 4: What the public wants, social pressures, and so it can be an incredibly difficult balance at times. And so oftentimes I view it as, yes, we need to as we learn things, what can that mean for us in updating how we think about various management practices? For sure, that’s like maybe that’s like, you know, baseline level of what does it mean for us as we consider management practices, But then we don’t you know, to then take that the next step. We don’t necessarily get the opportunity to say, hey, we’re going to change this. We need to be able to bring that information to the public, which is also what’s so incredibly valuable, like of your platform here in ability to be able to speak about these things is like, what’s critical is that we can bring this information to the public because there are a lot of things that were just stuck on that have happened for a really really long time that oh, this is a solution, this is this is what we need to do. But it’s not as simple as that. So being able to communicate it and in meaningful ways that connects with people and maybe change their perspective on things is sort of like ground zero for helping institute management change.
01:57:24
Speaker 1: Would you ever have the time and appetite to take your data sets from your box and take a look at lunar phase stuff with the rent? Does this interest you at all?
01:57:44
Speaker 4: Well, so I have just that with movement, Yeah, yeah, movement, we certainly could we absolutely could. And you’re talking from like a ret perspective because there’s so much focus on or are you talking like during the hunting season.
01:57:55
Speaker 1: Just the idea, just it would be the I mean, you could go down a million rabbit holes, which is generally that deer are moving at different times, moving in different places, different feeding patterns. According to Moonface, we absolutely could, and you could take because you have so much data, someone could go in and look at what you got and map it out to twenty eight day lunar cycles and say like, uh lo and behold, they do seem to be they do seem to behave differently according to the lunar or you’d be like, we can’t find it. You know, that would be that would be very helpful to me. But yes, thank you for doing that. So we need to with our T shirt proceeds. Should we like in dow a absolutely like research center for studies. There is a center for I’m just taking an intern crunching some numbers.
01:58:45
Speaker 5: I already talked to someone the other day about that we might have them on the show. Totally debunks that.
01:58:52
Speaker 1: He debunked, Well, maybe he can. Can you have to lend your data sets out is that.
01:58:57
Speaker 4: Anything in collaboration. Yeah, it all depends, but in collaboration. Yeah. Uh, here’s my next question for you. Okay, what what things.
01:59:07
Speaker 1: Are you that you haven’t been able to do besides lunar phase work? Like what do you what do you want to be doing, Jimmy, Like what do you want to be doing next? Like what are the what things do you look at? And you’re like, uh, I’m inspired by it and I think I can see a way that we might find some answers, like with this deer work in particular, kind of any kind of your work. Yeah, you know, I mean like you got to have fifty ideas, right, but then in the end you can only do one or two at a time or whatever. I don’t know what the numbers are, Yeah for sure.
01:59:37
Speaker 4: Well, I mean one of the one of the things which we talked about a little bit is we really need to be able to evaluate the rose pedal hypothesis, which I think we’ve talked maybe a little bit more so. The rose pedal hypothesis ties to uh, deer in particular about how they occupy space on a landscape, and the reference to a rose is that you have a matriarchal female that forms maybe the central pedal on the rose, and then you have her daughters that set up shop around her, and then her granddaughters, and so what you end up with is this natural lineal line of related females that occupy space on the landscape. They’ve evaluated this in white tail deer. It’s where the idea came from initially. So for white tail deer, it’s been used to implement management practices to reduce agricultural depredation related issues. So we’re deer getting into crops and that sort of thing. And the idea is that just reducing removing a handful of deer from the area won’t alleviate the problem because you still have other females that are living there, and then their daughters and granddaughters are just going to repopulate it. So the notion is, if you want no deer there, you need to wipe out the entire rows and then you’ll create vacant space and there won’t be any deer there and your problem will go away. Well, so as I’ve thought about one, migration, you know, migration is central to our ability to maintain larger bus populations. And then like as adult deer are incredibly faithful to their environment or does it come from anyway, And so we talked about ontouching migration, but then taking that one step further, what does that mean for how females occupy space on a landscape in particular their natal range, Like, do they even though they’re they’re migratory, do they similarly adopt space for mom on their summer range? So do we end up with these then matrilineal lines of occupied space on a summer range? And that’s what determines why we have animals where we do. And that again, which we we kind of alluded to a bit, but that’s central to our ability to maintain an abundance of deer because if we lose roses, we create vacant space and.
02:01:37
Speaker 1: There they’re not there anymore. And we need we need like.
02:01:40
Speaker 4: A firm answer of that to understand what that means across generational time to one both be able to look forward to what it can mean for management conservation now, but also I think.
02:01:50
Speaker 1: What’s equally as of value is to be able.
02:01:53
Speaker 4: To look backwards in time to what it means means for us in the past from what we’ve seen how the landscape has changed and what we see today and relevant to even just the Wyoming range. When we lose seventy percent of our deer population, we inevitably lost roses on the landscape. I mean we had family groups of our radio marke deer that were just completely wiped out. So at that level of loss, like it inevitably happened. So what does that mean for that vacant space over time?
02:02:17
Speaker 1: And if you like when you when you’re somewhere when you’re glassing, and you like hunt same place over a few years and you’re like, there’s always like a little pocket of activity yep in whatever, a little spot yep, you could just yep, gone gone. Why aren’t they there anymore? What happened? You know?
02:02:33
Speaker 4: Did they get pushed out of there? Well no, necessarily, they probably just all died, And so.
02:02:37
Speaker 1: No one’s got no one’s backfield, that’s right.
02:02:39
Speaker 4: And so what that could mean, you know, we’ve had we’ve had a number of which there’s a lot of challenges that mild your face. But if you think this applies to basically like any population of ungulate, if if animals are not using space, then a population may grow back up but reach a new abundance where they don’t grow anymore, because if they’re not using all that other forage and space on the landscape, it’s not functionally part of their caring capacity. It’s like they it’s like having a pasture, running cattle on a pasture. And you have a thousand acre pasture and you split it down the middle with a fence and you run cattle on the southern half of it. Are you going to run the number of cattle that you have for the thousand acre pasture? Are you going to run the number of cattle that you have for the five hundred acres that they have access to? And you’re going to run it on the five hundred acres not the thousand. And so when it comes to even as we think about, you know, nutrition density within any population, and you know, I hear this a lot like, man, how could nutrition be limiting on summer range?
02:03:33
Speaker 1: Look at these mountains.
02:03:34
Speaker 4: There’s some food everywhere. There’s no way that that could matter. Again, you like, you have to remember what it means for the animals themselves and the spaces that they live and occupy on that landscape, because they just don’t go willy nilly wander around unless you’re an elk and.
02:03:51
Speaker 1: Just access all of all of those foods.
02:03:54
Speaker 3: So you’re talking about I mean basically habitat loss, like you were losing meal to your habitat, even though the habitat looks the same.
02:04:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s exactly right. Yeah, it’s way a good way of putting it. Yeah. Yeah, it’s so interesting. You think about like spots, You’re like, why are they not here? Yeah? Yeah, and when are they going to come back? Man? You know where maybe you’re already doing work here, you know where. I feel like there’s so much personal bias applied to any conversation around ungilate density and predation. Right, you got people who the first thing they want to do anytime there’s no deer around, they want to tell you about the predators. You got people who basically want to tell you that predators egrass makes no difference.
02:04:45
Speaker 5: Right.
02:04:46
Speaker 1: You got these two camps. They’re generally not talking about what they regard to be the truth. They’re talking about what they wish was the truth, or how they’ve been brought up or trained. Right, the two these two wildly different perspectives. Do you have, Like are you do you consider are there ways to be to maybe freshen up that conversation about what is going on? Yeah, what do Kyle, like, what do coyote numbers mean for deer populations over time? What do coyote numbers mean for distribution? Yeah? Right? Do you wait on this? Yeah?
02:05:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I actually sent some of my initial predator related work with as it translates to on your population was actually some of the work I did on meal deer in the Sierra Nevada and California.
02:05:38
Speaker 1: And then I read that work, did you Yeah?
02:05:40
Speaker 4: I didn’t know as you Oh yeah, really, I did a whole bunch of work on nutrition predation on deer in the eastern Sierra.
02:05:48
Speaker 1: Oh you’re you know what, you know what? You’re right, because you’re even not not. I mean, you know you’re right. But I think I saw you now that you’re saying this. I saw you cited. Your work is cited in the bear California’s bear Management proposal. You’re here in Nevada, works outside of there is I just read that and left my mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I saw your name there. Yeah.
02:06:10
Speaker 4: So, and then of course we’ve done a number of good bit of predation related work in Wyoming as well. The to sort of like, look at a big picture relative to the two camps that that you reference.
02:06:26
Speaker 1: In which camp is right. Well, here’s the thing. The problem is neither camp is right. I had a suspicions, yeah, and anybody.
02:06:37
Speaker 4: The problem is is the moment anybody wants to say predators don’t matter because all mortality is compensatory, or predators matter. Basically, if a canine is on the landscape and it’s killing a deer, if that canine wasn’t there, we’d have the deer back. Both of those camps are wrong. The fact that there’s even camps is wrong, and it’s wrong in part because of the way the way in which we think about it, and and part of the challenge has been like how do we understand what predation means within populations? And where we have to go back to, regardless first is is where what makes what makes a population and it and what makes a population is everything we’ve talked about, and it’s food and access to the landscape. And so the bottom line is unless animals have access to the food in their basic requirements food, water, cover than it than it doesn’t matter. And so for example, if we’re if we’re in a place where animals are at the capacity of their landscape no matter what. Basically, any any younger of the population is going to attempt to grow more young each year than they can actually sustain within the population typically, and so what that means is a number need to die and hence compensatory and if we’re at that point, one dies and alleviates some level of competition for the others that remain, and so we end up with this feedback.
02:08:07
Speaker 1: So that’s real.
02:08:10
Speaker 4: And also we can have this situation where predators can play a role, as in, we have the capacity to grow more animals based on the food that is here, but predators are keeping it from growing. So we first have to consider food and we can quibble and argue, oh, this level of coyote population, this level of lion population, whatever the case may be. At the end of the day, you can’t interpret anything from that. It actually doesn’t mean anything because even for those predators, like they may have alternative prey that’s available to them. Where it matters how we understand how predators affect a prey population is actually to understand the prey population and the nutrition and capacity they have to grow before we can actually interpret it. What the predators matter or mean at all. And the other reason why I say both camps are wrong or that the very notion, like the moment you hear somebody toss something into the camp, you already know they’re wrong. And it’s because we can be in a situation in one single population and during one period of time predators are limiting growth, and during another period of time they don’t matter at all because they’re so nutritionally limited that they make no difference. And so you have yes here and you have no over here. Yeah, and then imagine the whole gradient in between. And I’ve worked in two systems now as an example, in the Sierras in the Eastern Sierra, where predation mattered for one migratory segment didn’t matter at all for the other. And then also looking at it from a time period of there was a window of time where predation mattered and then a window of time where it didn’t matter at all. And I’ve seen we’ve seen the same thing in Wyoming as well, same picture within the Wyoming range. Prior to the bad winners, predators really didn’t matter because we didn’t have the nutritional capacity to grow more deer in anyway we were there, so losing some of the predators really was going to be a washing didn’t matter. Now that we’ve dropped to the level that we have now and our females are fat, robust, we have the capacity to grow. Now we’re in a different situation where predators can have a limiting factor and reduce the ability for the population to grow. But then still, at the end of the day, well, what does that mean for us? Should we control predators? Should we have controlled predators over here? Should we not? Like it’s the sort of like. It all depends what are the objectives. Just because your remove predators from a system doesn’t mean you’re going to get more more dear pack, Yeah.
02:10:35
Speaker 1: Dude, you should be the only guest we ever have on you’d get so bored. No, it’s be a weekly show where I ask you questions. I like it. I like it because we’re never going to get through it all. We got to wrap up, Randall, got to do this whole stupid thing we’re doing.
02:10:54
Speaker 2: It’s the audio.
02:10:55
Speaker 3: We haven’t even talked about. Kevin’s fascinating other interests tax dermist hunter.
02:11:03
Speaker 4: Maybe maybe we should there layers, I know, let’s not wait five seven years again.
02:11:10
Speaker 1: I don’t know how whenever it was we did, we got to schedule the next round because we got to wrap up. Dude, it’s really like, you guys are doing super cool work. I wasn’t trying to hack on fishing game agencies, man, I was just trying to express this. I was trying to express this, like like I just hope there’s not a lot of bottlenecks and and and inefficiencies and and and like being able to take the research you’re doing, and and and being able to go and say like I can’t tell you anything, but there’s a I’m it really looks like this is going on. Are we considering this? I mean like, like, is the flow? No? I get this is the flow? Good? And I’m only saying that because, like you know, I’ve spent my whole life talking about wildlife, right, thinking about wildlife, talking about wildlife. I hang out with peopleho are obsessed with wildlife, and we routinely traffic and stuff that just isn’t backed up, and we say it like fact absolutely, and the guys that are doing management are the are my guys are peers. It’s like people are operating under assumptions that like aren’t as accurate, you know, and sort of looking at like like looking at lower deer numbers and we’re like, wow, the reason it’s that way is because of whatever. And then you go look at the man, dude, it’s just a different There’s there’s more to what’s going on. It’s a longer story. It’s not like you can’t just everything isn’t just looking at what just happened. Correct, Absolutely, you know you got you gotta dig back. Oftentimes you got to dig back right now and so and trying to correct a situation, you might be correcting the wrong inputs. Yes, oh absolutely, right, yep, for sure.
02:12:56
Speaker 4: And and I think the other the other side of that as well is you know a number of things that we talked about, some of the things we can’t necessarily change. We can’t necessarily change the weather and those sorts of things, but which I think can become a bit dissatisfying sometimes when like pre sip or snowpack or those sorts of things are such play such a driving role. We can manage density and other things like that to help moderate those things. But I also think what’s really important is our ability to simply manage our expectations as well, what does it mean for us? Which is kind of dissatisfying, right when you can’t say we’ll do this because I want this. Well, maybe we can’t get that, but here’s the reasons why, and we need you to understand that so we can all be we can all be at the same table with the same information, be like, Okay, here’s what we’re wrestling with. What is this going to mean for us going forward with whatever the situation may may be, from how we use habitat to our presence on the landscape, to how we manage hunting seasons.
02:13:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, love it. M Now you got to come back on happily. No, you’re not too terribly far away. Now, last time we went to you, remember you did you did? We have to hang out for a bit. Yeah, yeah, it’s great. Hmmm, we gotta go a little. Me and Randall’s thing is actually kind of interesting. I don’t want to talk bad about it. I just it’s very similar in a way, trying to find out what happened, what happened? What did happen? I know, I feel like you were very into it.
02:14:32
Speaker 3: I feel like you were very into that project up until this morning and now that it’s dimmed, you know it’s dimmed.
02:14:38
Speaker 1: We’re doing very similar work. Yeah, I like it. We’re looking at wow, yeah, like what did happen all the buffalo nice? And why? And what little micro things might have been different that would have led to a different outcome. We toy with all this mm hmm.
02:14:53
Speaker 3: We toy with all this, good man, And but we don’t have the data that you have.
02:14:58
Speaker 1: It’s just differ kind of work. Yeah, and we dispel, we dispel things. So yeah, it’s important to be like, well, what happened was this? Oh yeah kind of but also this nice you know, I look forward to that. Bison are fascinating. Yeah, I think you’ll. I think you’ll dig it. It’s got all the all the normal gross stuff that we like to put in there too. Of course I would anticipate nothing. Yes, we like it to be that you get kind of grossed out, but also you learn something you have to have that flare wouldn’t come from you. Yeah, you gotta have that that cade and something you being like oh, then you’re like, oh, can we clip that person sounding back? Splice that in, yeah, back and forth. All right, thank you for coming on the monteeth shop, University of Wyoming. Send your resumes. You’re looking for resumes right now? Oh man, you drowning the resumes. Yeah, don’t send your resu I’m always looking for supporters, if anybody’s interested. If you’re looking to support something great, and I think it was demonstrated here today. If you’re looking to support if you love wildlife, if you love the West, if you love wildlife, if you love these like majestic landscapes, and you really want to put your money, your conservation dollars to knowledge, this is a great place to put them. If you want to drive knowledge. It’s not lobbying, which is important. It’s not like on the ground, on the ground habitat improvement, rolling up old fences, getting rid of junipers, which is important. It’s not that. If you want to contribute to acquisition of knowledge that can then be extended out into management. Uh, I say the Montieth lab is money well spent shop. What was that shop? Oh? What? I just call it lab? Well that’s what they ought to call it. Yeah, you think about it. I think that’s where we started. More I think about it, it.
02:17:18
Speaker 3: Doesn’t bode well for a recording session later.
02:17:23
Speaker 1: The Montee Shop damn it. Thank you, Kevin my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Read the full article here