BREEDING

The Old: Big, dominant bucks do most of the breeding because they win most of the fights.

The New: Good news for dweebs! Subordinate bucks may sire just as many offspring. In a multiyear study from 1991 to 2003—and in ongoing studies started in 1999—in which DNA testing was used to determine paternity, DeYoung found that younger bucks managed to breed does, even in an area with a lot of mature bucks. The difficulties in establishing parentage of deer populations are enormous. It’s impossible to know how many does a buck mated with, as not all couplings result in pregnancy; how many of the fawns produced died before making it to the 6-month mark at which testing for parentage occurred; and whether all the bucks and does in a large area had been caught and tested. Nevertheless, DeYoung feels confident enough to assert some new ideas.

“So-called dominant bucks don’t breed as much as you would think,” he says. “Our ‘grand champion’ only fathered 12 documented offspring over a five- or six-year period, and he wasn’t a trophy deer antlerwise.” This buck and others probably sired more than the documented number of offspring, DeYoung adds, but he doubts it was significantly more.

“About a third of our studied bucks sired at least one fawn a year. It’s probably substantially higher than that, given fawn mortality and bucks that might have sired fawns that we never succeeded in getting DNA from. But the bottom line is that dominance is not as big a factor as we thought, and even younger bucks sire a good portion of the fawns.”

What This Means for Hunters: This has more implications for those trying to grow big deer on a given parcel of land than for hunting. If you’re trying to influence the gene pool by harvesting smaller bucks, you’re basically spitting into the wind. “If you manage very intensively on a small, high-fence area, maybe, given enough time [you could influence genetics],” DeYoung says. “But on most areas, it’s difficult to exert enough pressure to actually change the genetics of a wild, free-ranging deer herd. You can’t control which bucks breed, how many fawns they sire, or the other half of the equation: the doe’s contribution.”

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Tags: deer, hunting, whitetail

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 | RSS 2.0 feed.