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