duckDNA recently concluded its second season, which brought continued enthusiasm from hunters and several never-before-seen hybrids! On this episode, Dr. Mike Brasher is joined by conservation science assistants, Kayci Messerly and Katie Tucker, and Dr. Phil Lavretsky to share initial results from season 2 while discussing genetic mysteries uncovered through the analysis of several unique hybrid ducks. Also discussed are behind-the-scenes interactions with participating hunters and the potential future of duckDNA. Thanks to hunters for their support and participation and a special thanks to our year 2 funding partners -- Pinola Conservancy, Rice Pond Preserve, and Brian Hornung.
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Listen now: www.ducks.org/DUPodcast
Send feedback: DUPodcast@ducks.org
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Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Mike Brasher: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. I am Mike Brasher. I'm going to be your host on this episode. And this is an exciting episode, one that we've featured this topic numerous times over the past couple of years, and it's the after the duck season. And most people that pay attention to some of the stuff coming out of, at least the things that I'm associated with and other things out of Ducks Unlimited right now, will know that we have been heavily involved in duck DNA over the past two years. Hunting season is over, and so this is an opportunity for us to reflect on the things that we've been able to accomplish with Duck DNA, mostly this year, but we'll probably also look back a little bit on where we are overall as a project, also to say thank you to everyone that has been interested and participated. And as you can see, I have two very special guests joining us for this episode here in studio. We have a return guest. It's going to join us remote here, but first I'm going to turn to the folks here in studio and allow them to introduce themselves.
Kayci Messerly: Hi, I'm Kayci Messerly. I'm one of the conservation science assistants that's been emailing back and forth with many of you for Duck DNA.
Katie Tucker: And I'm Katie Tucker. I'm another conservation science assistant here at Ducks Unlimited. And I also handle the emails and I also handle the Instagram DMs. So thank you.
Mike Brasher: And Katie, you've been here for right at 12 months now.
Katie Tucker: Yes, this weekend was my one year anniversary. Thank you.
Mike Brasher: And Katie may be hanging around with us for a little bit longer. We're still working out a few things there. Kayci started with us into November.
Kayci Messerly: Late November, and you guys are stuck with me.
Mike Brasher: And then also I'll go now to online, Dr. Phil Havretsky joining us remotely from the University of Texas, El Paso. Phil, great to have you back with us.
Phil Lavretsky: Always great to be here talking about duck DNA.
Mike Brasher: Have you been busy as of late?
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, my workday is 150% of the workday. The number of projects just keeps growing without stop. But a lot of it always constantly comes back to Duck DNA. So pretty exciting avenue for growth and everything. So I'm excited to talk about it.
Mike Brasher: How many times do you talk about duck DNA in one way or another in a given day?
Phil Lavretsky: 60% of my day. Are you serious? I don't know. Yeah. In the class, I'm always like, oh, this is an interesting subject. Guess what we learned in duck DNA? To my wife, guess what we did to duck DNA? And then she would say, please stop talking about that.
Mike Brasher: I can relate to that. Yeah.
Phil Lavretsky: And then somebody would be like, I'd like to do a grizzly bear project. And I'd be like, we do duck DNA. Sure, we can do grizzlies. Yeah, it's ever evolving way to showcase what is possible and how to do it in other organisms. So it's sort of like laying the groundwork for a lot of other conservation work that my lab's trying to get going.
Mike Brasher: So I also want to use this, the opportunity today to talk with Katie and Kayci a little bit about their work. They've, as they mentioned, they've been the ones that are interacting with our participants and our applicants and answering emails and answering a few of the DMs in our new Instagram account. answering a few phone calls, right? But Katie, you've been involved, you've been here 12 months, and you've been involved in Duck DNA kind of peripherally. For the majority of that time, Ray, who was unable to join us today, unfortunately, but Ray Moore, many of you will recognize Ray's name and have been interacting with him over the past, what, eight months, eight or nine months or so. Ray has been the one that has really led the the advancements that we made during year two. So thank you to Ray. Sorry that you couldn't be here. But if you go to our Instagram account, folks will be able to sort of put a face to a name with Ray Moore. We have some videos there that Ray is featured in. But Katie has been then helping out over the past three months or so, three or four months as things got really busy, kind of figured out that we need more people working on this. And When Casey came on board, we started having her work on this as well. But Katie, as a bit broader than just DuckDNA, you've been working on one of the other big projects that you were working on was this trail camera project. So if you don't mind, I didn't tell you that I was going to ask you this. So we're just going to see how you do on the fly here. telling people what we were experimenting with there. That was sort of another sort of citizen science pilot year. And just fair warning, we don't have enough information right now to know what's going to happen with that. But just tell people what we were experimenting with.
Katie Tucker: So for the trail camera project, what we did was we got some cameras from a donor, Wyzie, shall I shout them out? Sure. Wyzie donated the cameras. Thank you Wyzie. And we sent those to some participant landowners in areas with high mallard harvest. to investigate mallard sex ratios, so number of drakes to number of hen mallards across migration. So we had the camera set to take a photo every 30 minutes in whatever area the landowner thought was best, or manager thought was best, to get the most mallards in one photo. So that's been fun also.
Mike Brasher: And so you've been able to interact with a lot of those landowners as a result of that. A lot of emails back and forth, right? A lot, yes. But that's okay. I love talking with new people involved in the projects. And then one of the things that we're trying to answer there is, as you mentioned, this sex ratio trend to develop, see if we can use trail cameras as an independent data source for estimating sex ratios in duck populations. And I don't have any idea whether the photos that we were able to get using the the approach we use this year are going to give us exactly what we want, but we'll continue to explore that going forward. Kayci, you've only been here three months or four months now? We're getting close to… November is four months.
Kayci Messerly: Yeah. Wow. Time flies.
Mike Brasher: We're having fun. It does. And so you're involved in another project related to evaluating some harvest estimates and There'll be an opportunity to discuss that in more detail. We're very early in that in collaboration with the Fish and Wildlife Service and our state agency folks through the flyway. So I don't want to talk too much about any of that, but I wanted to give you all an opportunity or Katie, you especially talk about some of the other big project that's been on your plate. But in these positions, these 12-month conservation science assistant positions, you've been interacting with a lot of different people, a lot of different projects. So if If any of our listeners are a senior-level undergraduate or a soon-to-be-graduating master's student, keep an eye out on the Ducks Unlimited Career Board. In the next, I don't know, six months or so, we will be hopefully renewing these positions beginning in the fall and winter of next year. So if this is the type of thing that you want to think you might be interested in, keep an eye open. Hopefully, we'll see your name come through our applicant list. I wanted to move now to DuckDNA. We want to reflect on some of what our accomplishments were this year. I think last year, the first year, we had 4,200 applicants. I'm going to ask Kayci here to tell us, give us some of the high-level statistics about how many applicants we had, how many participants we selected. I can jump in there and talk about some of what our targets were, and maybe we hit those, maybe we deviated a little bit, but go ahead. What did we do this year in terms of applicants and participants? How did all that break down?
Kayci Messerly: Yeah, so very exciting. This year, we had around 3,500 applicants that applied to be part of the DuckDNA program. Out of those applicants, we were able to accept around 850 participants. And of those participants, we had about 250 of those that actually ended up being our hybrid participants. So many of you will see on our DuckDNA Instagram post that we have our weekly hybrid post. And so these have been an accumulation of past years and we're starting to transition now into our current year as hybrids, which are really exciting and new. And so we've had a great time with that and we get to behind the scenes kind of play around and get excited about things before we get to release them to all of you guys. Very exciting for us. Another great highlight that we had is we actually accepted participants from the 48 lower states. So that was very exciting for us. We're happy that we have been able to reach such a broad audience and that everyone's been so willing to engage and participate with us.
Mike Brasher: So Katie, I want you to share, you've been working on this for a few months. You've seen Ray working on it for nearly a year. What was What was the most exciting, rewarding aspect of it to you? We're going to get into some photos here from some of the results here momentarily and ask Phil to talk about some of those. But from your experience, what's the most memorable sort of takeaway and what'd you enjoy most? I'm assuming you enjoyed something associated with this.
Katie Tucker: Well, I did. Well, for one thing, this was my first duck season that I was able to hunt, so I was able to submit some samples myself to this, which was fun. Wild mallard, by the way. But other than that, just being able to interact with so many people and seeing the enthusiasm that these hunters have for the science that we're doing and the issues at hand is really inspiring to me.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, that was the number one takeaway for me. And we began to see this last year, but it really took off this year when we had a better way to interact and communicate with our participants. And that was It was when we launched our Instagram account. It's at the DuckDNA. At DuckDNA was already taken, so we went with the DuckDNA. It's only appropriate, right? And that was sort of a game changer. And thanks to our social media team here at Ducks Unlimited, who have been very pivotal in guiding what we do on that account. And then the collaboration between DuckDNA and Ducks Unlimited has really maximized the the exposure that we get from some of this. And we have quite a following and quite a loyal following on that account right now. And so every week now we are sharing, typically it's a hybrid. That's what we've been doing because those are some of the most interesting results that we're getting. There will be a time in the future where we'll summarize and present the results from the larger collection of samples. But for right now, a lot of the hybrids that we're We're getting the results back from pretty fascinating. We want to be able to share those because I know how people just go crazy over these hybrid birds. Chris, I guess if you can go ahead and share my screen, I'm going to bring up this post that we… It was sort of a best of the best type thing that we… A post that we made towards the end of the year. These were some of the most fascinating looking birds that we had received by that time. We do have the results back for most of these. We have the result back for that one, I'm pretty sure. I don't know about this one, Austin LaCroix. I haven't looked at the results. This one will be out, should be out by the time this airs. We're gonna talk about this one in a minute. These were a few that we, yeah, that were some of the more exciting birds that we had by the end of the year. We've had a lot more come in since then, so we've got at least a year's worth of good material, and some of these things are pretty cool. This was one that was out last week. I want to talk about this one in a moment, share some more details there. I don't know if I've seen the results for this one. We may have it. We have a number of samples, birds that were submitted that appear similar to this one. Phil, do you have a guess on that one? Do you know what that is just by looking at it?
Phil Lavretsky: I would imagine it's actually a black duck game farm wild.
Mike Brasher: What makes you say game farm? Oh, you think that's a three species hybrid.
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, so we say that as a three. Game farm is just simply a breed of the mallard, but a three taxa or three genetic grouping. The only reason I say that is because it would be exciting if it was. There is nothing. So one of the things that I was going to note is with all these pictures, right? So we're getting all that variability in the phenotype and hopefully we can run some really cool analyses that we do in my lab where we're actually going to see if there's any sort of trait that we could look at and be like, we have a high probability that that's actually a black duck mallard hybrid. Or that's a model duck mallard hybrid or pintail or whatever it might be. And maybe even to the generation if we can get enough different plumage variants that we can share to the public and they can start looking into these things and making more educational guesses and then test it with duck DNA.
Mike Brasher: Speaking of that, the plumage characteristics, Phil, I think one of the reasons why we selected this one, number one, it's a great photo. So note to everyone out there that if you want your bird to be on Instagram whenever it comes to submitting a hybrid bird or something like that, make sure you get good photos. You can see the type of photos that we prefer on Instagram by looking at it. So note that. But yeah, go back to that photo there, Chris. And so Phil, white edging, a little more prominent white edging on these tertials, maybe even some white edging down here. I'm not sure how unusual that is. But that was, I think, one of the things that stood out to me. Do you notice that with game farm birds, there is a bit more prominent phenotypic expression of white in various locations?
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, so usually that and a lack or a disjointed neck collar, so that white around the neck. And the other thing is actually if you go back to that picture, and I'll show you. So right, so there's no real neck collar, but that could also be sort of a black duck trait. But actually, if you look at the wing and you look at that upper white wing bar, do you see how it's unequal? Yeah, hybrids tend to always have an unequal amount of white. So not every feather is actually equally being expressed like it would be in a mallard or black ducks don't really have the white wing bar, but you know what I mean.
Mike Brasher: Now, do you mean game farm hybrid or just a hybrid in general?
Phil Lavretsky: Hybrid in general, and that's a great question. Whether there's a sort of size difference that we could hone in on that would suggest to us that, this must have some game farm in it. Like I said, we never had a collection of pictures like this to really get after it. And after this year, one of my incoming students, Another big thing, we're gonna be taking three new, or I'm taking three new students, probably a bad idea on my part. But one of them is gonna be continuing our path forward with using artificial intelligence to try and develop applications for hunters and state and federal agencies where you could take pictures and it'll tell you age, plumage, and genetic probability. And we're going to be using a lot of this data to feed it, feed those models that my current PhD student is just finishing up. And so we're going to be extending that into multi-species models. So that way, one day hunters can go out there and take a picture and I'll even probably tell you this is a northern pintail mallard or gadwall mallard or whatever it might be.
Mike Brasher: We look forward to that. This one, uh, Nicholas, the P three, the P three, sorry, Nicholas, if I mispronounced your name, if you're watching or listening, but this one will be out. Um, we're going to, we're going to go back to that here in a minute. This was one that I was really curious about. It's from Gavin Bunting. So Gavin, if you are watching or listening, or if anybody knows Gavin, tell him to get in touch with us because we do not have the tissue for this bird. Phil, does this look like a true albino?
Phil Lavretsky: No, I don't think so.
Mike Brasher: No, you don't think so? I don't think so. What do you think this is?
Phil Lavretsky: You think this is a- I think it's just some domestic thing. You think so? Probably a game farm mallard. Yeah, I mean, It's possible, but my money would be on a female Game Farm Mallard that's just got that, what do they call the turkeys when they're all white, that heritage breed? There must be a breed to that.
Mike Brasher: Anyways. I don't know. Well, let me ask you a question here. So this has an orange bill. Would that be an indication that it's not a true albino? If this were a true albino, there would be sort of pinkish something.
Phil Lavretsky: I wouldn't think it would it would be able to put those carotenoids into its bill to just express that that coloration. I just I don't think it's albino. Also, if you look at the eye, you know, it seems like I know see that.
Mike Brasher: So Gavin Bunting, get in touch with us. I sent you an email trying to trying to find out where that tissue sample is. So yeah, we definitely would love that. Love to get that. What's the most favorite bird that, or your favorite bird thus far?
Kayci Messerly: So mine so far is actually Nicholas Lepretres that we have mentioned and hopefully will be out by the time this podcast posts. Very excited. It's just one of those birds that visually is very appealing to look at.
Mike Brasher: So here's this bird again. And you said this is your favorite. It's the most colorful. Whenever one of these things kind of starts making its way, there's Nicholas right there, starts making its round on social media. Everybody has opinions. I've had some people say, that's a hideous bird because of the abnormal color patterns. Then there's other people that say it's an incredibly beautiful bird because of the dramatic colors that it has. It certainly does not look like a normal bird. And we do have the results for this one. And we're going to show them right here. It will have already been revealed, but there it is.
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, that's that one.
Mike Brasher: Game Farm Mallard and Wood Duck. And so, Phil, I guess an important question here is, like, there was a lot of white in that bird. And is that the Game Farm element of this, you think?
Phil Lavretsky: I think that that's part of it. I was trying to look at it as you were doing it. And I was like, I wonder if it's got domestic in it, and it does. So that way the audience knows, I don't know anything about these pictures and we just run through these samples left and right. And I call it as the DNA says it, right? So even when I was looking at that, I was like, I wonder which one that one was. I mean, I was like, it's a wood duck, but what? And I knew that we had some wood duck wild and wood duck game farm and I didn't know if it was this one. But I think this is the first case of this or genetically vetted game farm wood duck that I know of. So that's pretty exciting. Congrats to Nicholas.
Mike Brasher: And so Phil, one of the other things on these certificates is we have a maternal lineage designated there. And that, tell us again what that is. This one was a wood duck.
Phil Lavretsky: So that means the- So that means mom, the mom to make that to make that boy was a wood duck, right? So that means the paternal or dad was a game farm male mallard. So when we're talking about these first-generation hybrids, we can say like, hey, 50% of the DNA is one parent and 50% is the other. We can then look at the maternal lineage to actually determine who the female was and who the male must have been, right? So he's just tracked it because mom gives all her kids mitochondrial DNA. Dad does not provide any of the mitochondrial DNA. So we know that whatever the empty DNA call is, that had to have been mom. And so by rule, then dad gave the other 50% for the nuclear part or the rest of the genome. And in which case it must have been this other thing, which in this case was game farm mallard.
Mike Brasher: Katie, what was your favorite bird thus far?
Katie Tucker: My favorite bird is actually one that we don't have results for yet.
Mike Brasher: Of course, of course it is.
Katie Tucker: But it was Cody Jones. Is there a story here? Yes. So this came into the inbox when I was going through and I fell in love with it and I insisted we get a kit for it. And now we have a bet in the office about what its genetic makeup is.
Mike Brasher: Did, who recorded the, I think I did. I think I recorded our respective guesses.
Katie Tucker: I hope so because I did not.
Mike Brasher: That is Cody. You said Cody Jones. Cody Jones.
Katie Tucker: Do I have it in here?
Mike Brasher: Yes. So we'll bring this up. And so yeah, Cody Jones calling Cody Jones. We need, does he have the kit? Did the kit, was it delivered?
Katie Tucker: I'm not sure. I wasn't able to track the, the number from FedEx.
Mike Brasher: So, all right. Um, do you want to show this? I guess we just did. There we go. Way to go, Chris. So, Phil, did you want to take a guess?
Phil Lavretsky: Oh, I think it's a female brewer's duck, maybe.
Katie Tucker: What? That's a new one. Seriously?
Phil Lavretsky: So that edging… No. So the edging screams… Yeah. So the ones that don't have internal edging on the back scream black duck. The ones where you have the internal markings scream hybrid. I think it's a female. God.
Mike Brasher: Look at that. That's kind of interesting.
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So it's going through molt. So it's already switching out into its non-breeding plumage. And that's why the feathers are so crisp, like that coloration. It's already molted out a lot of its back pattern, man.
Mike Brasher: Wow, we stumped him. Cody, we need the tissue.
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, get that tissue. I'm gonna go with female black duck game farm. Let's go with that. I'm going with that. Let's go with that. What did you guys think? All right, we're not going to talk about it. We don't talk about that.
Mike Brasher: We're going to keep that close to the vest.
Phil Lavretsky: All right. All right. Okay.
Mike Brasher: All right. So how about we take a break right here? I think we're sort of at a good point and we're going to come back. We've got a few more birds that we're going to show you from our Instagram account. We're going to show the certificates. We're going to show the breakdown of that genetic ancestry. We're going to get Phil to tell us a little bit about that, how these things could happen. We'll see where it goes from there. Stay with us, folks. We'll be right back. Everybody, welcome back. I am Dr. Mike Brasher, and we're going to continue on with our discussion about Duck DNA season two. I'm thrilled to be, again, they didn't run off, joined in studio by Kayci Messerly and Katie Tucker, and Phil's back with us as well. And I want to go immediately right off the bat here to the most One of the most fascinating birds that we've had here thus far, I'm going to zoom back out there so the people that are watching can see the full text here of the genetic makeup of it. And this is a bird that a lot of folks on social media would have seen from, I think, back in November. It is a hybrid northern shoveler. Actually, this is a three-species hybrid. Obviously, it's related to the blue-winged sets of ducks you can see in this photo, the blue shoulder patch. You can see the white crescent on the face, which is reminiscent of a blue-winged teal, but it has a green head and it has sort of a cinnamon body, and there's three species here. in North America that are very closely related in that spatula, however you pronounce it, genus, that's the blue-winged teal, cinnamon teal, and the northern shoveler. And most people, I think, Phil, when they saw this one, guessed that it was a… What did they think? Was it northern shoveler by cinnamon teal, I think is what most people guessed it was? I don't think… This was harvested in Yolo County, California by Nick Barr. And when we got the results back, lo and behold, there's three species in it. Definitely go check out our video here, the recording on YouTube, the Ducks Unlimited channel. You want to be able to see this bird for sure. Or you can go to our Instagram account, at theduckdna and see this bird also with a little write-up that we had. But Phil, how does this How does this happen? What's going on with this bird?
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, great question. This is the first true three species hybrid that I think I've ever actually seen. Cuz like I said, all the other three taxa things are usually game farm mallard hybrid, hybridizing with something else, typically a black duck. This is something that suggests that immediately suggests that blue-winged teal and cinnamon-teal hybrids are viable to some extent, right? So you can't have a hybrid with a hybrid if the first hybrid isn't viable. This one actually made my brain hurt a little bit, because technically, if a hybrid makes another hybrid, I don't know what to call that, to be fair. But yeah, this suggests that not only are the two two species hybrid viable. But they could create a third species that's not only viable, but we've learned a bit about this bird because it was banded. Not only viable, but it survived for, how old was this bird? Seven years at minimum?
Mike Brasher: Yeah, seven or so years, something like that. Yeah, because it was banded, and are you gonna tell the other part of that?
Phil Lavretsky: So Chris Nikolai, right, was the one banding it, and this was a botulism bird that was supposed to keel over, I think, and it survived. And it was banded and released. And then seven years later, it was finally harvested. So it's been on the landscape for so long. And it was, to be fair, harvested in the place that my old stomping grounds in Yolo, which is super cool. Yeah, this one is like the ultimate. This was my favorite hybrid so far.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, it was definitely fascinating. So Brian Huber of California Waterfowl is the one that I think reached out to Nick, or maybe Nick reached out to Brian asking his opinion. He said, well, send it in to Duck DNA. And of course, Ducks Unlimited is involved with sort of leading the Duck DNA in collaboration with you, Phil. And then Chris Nicolai, who at the time was an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service whenever he was doing this banding. But of course now, Chris is a good friend of ours, and he's a waterfowl scientist for Delta Waterfowl. So four different agencies, organizations involved in one way or another in this bird, and it's banded, and it's three different species. And it was just a really cool finding and really cool result that we ended up with here is 51% northern shoveler and 35% blue-winged teal, 14% cinnamon teal. And so, Phil, I guess why… So 51% northern shoveler, that tells you that the northern shoveler was one of the parents of this bird in all likelihood, right? That's almost a definite slam dunk. If you have a bird contributing about half of the genetics, half the DNA, that's a parent, right?
Phil Lavretsky: Yep. Yeah, yeah. So the second you see… So you can think of your genome as two chromosomes, one's mom and one's dad, right? And so in a perfect F1, one part of all your chromosomes, it would be Mallard, and the other part would be Gadwall making a brewer's duck, in which case it's always 50-50. And so when you see 50%, you know that 50% is provided by a single parent. It's that other 50% that is then broken down into these two other blue wing groups, right? Cinnamon teal and blue wing teal. And then when you look at those ratios, it becomes interesting. But in effect, when I was looking at it, that ratio is also itself a 50-50. So that that first blue-winged cinnamon-teal hybrid must have been also an F1 hybrid that then bred with a northern shoveler. And if I remember correctly, the mitochondrial lineage here is northern shoveler. So it would have been a female shovey with a male cinnamon blue wing, teal hybrid. Yeah.
Mike Brasher: And so, okay. 51% coming from the shoveler. That was the female. 35% and 14% blue wing and cinnamon teal. Why is it not 25 and 25 or roughly 25, give or take on those other two? What's happening there?
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, a lot of it is because these three species are closely related. And so when you start mixing and matching, these ancestry programs have a harder time figuring out some of those proportions more specifically. And if we we actually look at some of the standard errors, they probably do overlap with 25-25, but this was the best point estimate that the program could provide given the data. I'm guessing if we actually looked at a whole genome level, it probably is 50%, 25, and 25 if we got more of its genome. Anyways, yeah.
Mike Brasher: That's more or less. So we're not doing the whole genome?
Phil Lavretsky: Why are we not doing- No, we're not. We're doing partial, right? The whole genome would cost a little bit more money. Yeah, so what we're doing is a snapshot of the genome. You're still looking at, and to be fair, that's how 23andMe, Ancestry.com, KnowYourDog does. It's a handful. It's a lot of loci. So we're looking at roughly 20 to 30,000 genes per se, that provide us a snapshot of what that genome is, what the ancestry is. The nice thing is we are about to publish a paper that showcases that what we get with our 30,000 SNP data set or like 15 million SNPs all across the genome has a correlation of 0.99. So we're getting the real ancestry. We're getting the real thing. We just can't look at it at a sort of finer scale, if you really wanted me to paint all the chromosomes perfectly, it would take a bit more.
Mike Brasher: The unfortunate thing is the really neat discoveries are hiding away in that 0.01%, what's left of that correlation, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm just kidding. I just wanted to make sure. I've got a few more photos of this particular bird. I'm going to zoom in here if people didn't see it. But this shows the real cinnamon coloration on the breast and belly of this particular bird. There's the certificate for it.
Phil Lavretsky: And could you go back? Sure. Somebody actually noted it because they must have zoomed in at the bill. But the lamellae that right birds feed on, the lamellae of a shoveler, if you've never looked at it, is very, very different than a cinnamon teal or a bluing teal that has more typical lamellae. It's not like these really fine hair-like combs that you see in a shovel. In fact, if you zoom in, you can see it. So you really do have all three species represented in this their characteristics represented in it, which is wild.
Mike Brasher: Chris Nicolai also told us that he pulled up the measurements that they collected from this bird, and it was larger than your typical cinnamon or bluing, which would be… Yeah, that would be the representation of that shoveler in it for sure. Let me see. Okay, and there's the banding certificate. Okay, so what else do we need to talk about? Kayci, any questions from you? Katie, you?
Kayci Messerly: I think we would like to just shout out to everybody that has participated. We've had a really good time and a lot of good laughs. We love when people call us from the field, excited that they've just shot a hybrid. Shout out to Captain Murray. We had a great day. And the office, when you called us straight from the field, that's what we're looking for. And we're excited that other people also have that excitement. So, I just wanted to let Captain Murray know that he made our day one of the days in the office.
Mike Brasher: Good. Captain Murray, thank you. I have another bird here that we want to talk about. This is from Jeff DeBlue down in Louisiana. Jeff is a very strong Ducks Unlimited supporter. Jeff, thanks for all that you do. This is a Brewer's Duck, and we have several of these, but we got some entertainment out of this, and we actually used this as an opportunity to explain some things. So we're showing a dead mount, taxidermy mount here that Jeff provided. So Jeff, and we've actually had a couple of other people do this as well. This bird was shot a couple of years ago. I don't know the exact date. I'll show it here in a second. December 22. Doug DNA wasn't around in December of 22. I think he had saved the head or something from this bird and a couple of others. Maybe someday intending on getting a DNA analysis, I don't really know, but I'm glad we were there to do that for Jeff. And so this one comes back, Phil, with 49% gadwall, 44% wild mallard. And as Sladen Fraser says here, absolutely flawless math. We do appreciate that. I think what he was referring to is the fact that 49% 44% does not sum to 100% and Somebody else was a little more sort of direct in asking. Yeah, so Barton Hunts to what's the other 7% so we appreciate that question and so Phil where's the other 7% and
Phil Lavretsky: in the standard error. Explain. Yeah, so when each individual is analyzed, we do it a thousand times to figure out what the optimum number is and what the standard error is. So basically, you get an ancestry plus minus some number. And so not all of them equal 100 because of that standard error. And if I went back to some of these birds, there's probably some missing data that's resulting in a slightly higher standard error in that bird in particular than others. If you included the standard error, they all add up to 100. So yeah, so that's typically where it goes. What was I going to point out? I was just also gonna point out the fact that this bird, right? So it's been in the freezer for a while, but we were able to access the DNA to a good enough extent that we were able to get this thing sequenced. And that attests to the methods that we use plus that we continue to optimize, that it doesn't have to be perfect DNA for it to work, which is pretty remarkable. And so far for this year, we still are less than 1% complete failure rate where we can't get anything to work, which is still remarkable to get tissue from a bunch of hunters in the field in all sorts of conditions. still get this type of data. It's really a testament to the hunters themselves for following directions and getting this stuff to us that we're able to get it done.
Mike Brasher: I will say we do need our hybrid participants to follow the directions a little more closely. We actually do want you to use the app, the online app that we've set you up an account in, and we want you to enter the information in the app. It makes our lives so much easier. It makes the data so much more valuable for Phil in potentially using it in future studies. Chris, go back to the screen. I want to just flip through the rest of these photos for folks. This is, again, the brewer's duck with from Jeff DeBlue. He mounted this bird himself, and I think he does a fair bit of taxidermy. And I think maybe that was actually the bird when it was after harvested. And so prominent black ring there around the neck. Brewer's ducks have a pretty large diversity in terms of the appearance from the hybrids. Hybrid mallard gadwall. So we'll probably learn a few things, the more of those we get. And I'm going to go to another one here that I think might have surprised a few folks. I'll tell you in a second here, Chris. So this one right here, you can go ahead and pull the screen back up. This is… Chris Clausen. Now, Phil, when you see this bird, do you know what that is?
Phil Lavretsky: Mexican duck.
Mike Brasher: Now, you know it not because of the results, but you know it just from looking at it?
Phil Lavretsky: Me and my dog stare at them every single morning as they come in into the pond that we live by. Yeah, no, I mean, that's one of the things that we study and one of the big things that we've published on is that all those mallard traits are not necessarily indicative of a hybrid because Mexican ducks, black ducks, and model ducks quite recently evolved from the Mallard. So they, in some proportion of each one of them still showcase some of those maladies primarily in the first year males. And that's, and that's definitely some of the things, but yeah, Chris is great with those out of Arizona.
Mike Brasher: So we are showing this bird here on screen. It looks, I think most people just off the cuff would look at it and say that it's a hybrid because it has some green iridescence in the head, but it otherwise kind of looks like, I mean, most people would say it looks like a hen mallard, but it looks like a hybrid between a mallard and a Mexican duck or something. It has some semi-curled tail feathers, but Lo and behold, the genetics say 100% Mexican duck.
Phil Lavretsky: To be fair, when I first started studying these and I got to go to Sonora and Chihuahua and elsewhere, and I would collect these types of birds, I'd be like, oh yeah, look at all these hybrids everywhere. And then we started doing the genetics. I'm like, what happened to all my hybrids? And that's when we started asking the questions about the plumage of like, well, what is happening? Can we categorize them? And lo and behold, once we understood how to age Mexican ducks properly, and this was work done by my previous PhD student, Flor Hernandez, where we started quickly realizing that all these quote unquote hybrids are actually first year males expressing some of this malatrace, kind of like a high school boy that can't control their testosterone, apparently.
Kayci Messerly: Well, and I can say that we're going to have quite a few participants that are going to be surprised by what they get on their certificates coming out. Yep. We were looking through a few photos, me and Ty, our new conservation science assistant today, and we found a couple that we were like, oh, that's not what we expected either. So a few people will be pleasantly surprised.
Mike Brasher: I haven't even seen those, so that's exciting. I want to test Phil here. So Chris, if you can bring up my screen here and don't read the text, but when you, when you look at that, what do you think that is?
Phil Lavretsky: Uh, I would have, I would have called it probably game farm black duck or something like that. Yeah.
Mike Brasher: That changed your mind. Most people would call this a blonde mallard, right? It's sort of a brownish with some whitish feather highlights. Is this a blonde mallard? Well, it turns out Dr. Phil is wrong. It is a 90% game farm mallard, 10% domestic duck. Okay, unpack that for us. What's going on there? And thanks to William Quam for sending in the tissue from this bird harvested in Alabama.
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, so we have a whole bunch of, in our reference set that every duck gets compared to includes game farm mallards, known game farm mallards, so we can assess that. But we also have things like khaki Campbell that serve as a reference for an alternate domestic duck, right? So game farm mallard is a specific domestic duck and we need to have an alternate in case there's variability that isn't explained by Game Farm and potentially some other park doc. And so that allows us to tease that sort of apart. We can't get to the specific breed unless we have representatives of all sorts of breeds. But this way it allows our methods to at least ask the question, is it truly all Game Farm? Or is there a symptom or ancestry from something else? And in this case, could be allotted to Game Farm, but rather that Game Farm is one of the breeds or one of the ancestries. And it's got some ancestry from another domestic breed, probably explaining all the characteristics we're seeing in there that make it look blonde.
Mike Brasher: Okay, we're going to do another test. So Phil, all right, what do we have going on here? This is test, Dr. Phil.
Phil Lavretsky: And this really showcases to everybody that I just get the data and I make my calls based on genetics alone. I don't necessarily look at all the pictures unless there's something real weird. I think that's a female, Wild game farm.
Mike Brasher: Female wild game farm. Okay. Well, so this was harvested in Mommy Bay, Ohio, December of 2021. Again, another person that harvested this bird multiple years ago and then saved it and sent it in just hoping that one day there would be a duck DNA available to do the analysis. It was your lucky day. It was your lucky day, Jordan. There you go. 61% wild, 39% game farm. Now, here's an interesting thing. This one looks vastly different from some of the other wild mallard, game farm mallard hybrids. It was a solid white bird. Solid white with the orange bill, probably has orange feet as well, I would probably guess. It might. Maybe we have that. I don't know. Yeah, it's totally different, solid white. But 61% wild mallard, 39% game farm, unknown wild back cross is what we call it. So what do you think's going on with this one? Do you think there's some multiple game farm breedings involved in the background of this?
Phil Lavretsky: I don't know. I think that, because when a bird is something else, including Muscovy. We find that, the fact that we can see that ancestry being assigned to something else. I think this is just showcasing that maybe the way those genes are put together, maybe that plumage just doesn't, there's no expression of color, right? Melanism essentially got deleted or something like that. I think that that's part of the question of what happens when you recombine and combine in nature. And in this case, the only reason I thought it was wild is the size of that bird. Typically, you don't see the game farm mallards being typically of that size. The white, I've seen. That I've seen in the past. So that's the only reason. That's the best explanation I can give currently.
Mike Brasher: So here I have two things. We need to call out Justin Strong, who we still have not been able to get a tissue sample from. And again, this is one that we're super interested in. I have multiple photos of it.
Phil Lavretsky: Now that one could really be albino. Like look at that bill. It's pinkish. The size though is small. That black in the back. I just, I don't know what else would make that. But then again, we don't know how albinoism sort of works in these birds perfectly. So yeah.
Mike Brasher: And we do not have the tissue for this. I cannot remember what the status is if we sent Justin a kit or if We wanted to, and he hasn't yet responded or what the deal is. But if any of you know Justin Strong, who would have harvested this incredible, it's an overall white bird, has some black flecking on it. But the bill in this case, as Phil was talking about, is more pinkish and doesn't have that prominent orange coloration. Desperately want to test this bird as well. So Yeah. What else, Katie? Any other examples that you want to go through? Any other kind of neat birds hiding in our folders for which we already have the results, for which they'll already be out by the time this airs? No.
Katie Tucker: No.
Katie Tucker: We want to keep all of them a surprise.
Mike Brasher: We're going to keep them a surprise. So anybody else we need to call out, though, that hasn't gotten in touch with us about anything? No? On that too?
Katie Tucker: Definitely, yes. If we told you you could get a kit and you haven't activated your account, please activate your account. If you haven't sent us a tissue sample, please do that. We want to see all of your birds.
Mike Brasher: So we do have a ton of… Well, did you say how many samples, how many tissue samples we received this year? I think you did.
Kayci Messerly: I did not say the number of samples we received. So we have received so far around 1,000 samples for this year. But there are another 1,000 that we sent out that exists still out in the universe. So these are kits that we sent to people that maybe got lost in the ether, are needing to be filled. Or if you are not sending in your vials this year, maybe you didn't fill them completely, that's okay. Let us know, send us a quick email. This allows me to just put in a note for ourselves for next year. So we know that those vials are still intended for use in the future, that they're just not able to be filled this year. So that would be a great piece of information that you could send over to me and I'll just log that in my little Excel file for the future.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, so that is a good issue. So let's say somebody didn't fill all three vials. I think our preference would be for them to go ahead and send in however many they did fill, right? Go ahead and do that. Hang on to the other one until next year. And then if you fill it, you can just mail it back to us.
Kayci Messerly: Yeah, so we've been giving generally two options. So you can go ahead and send those vials that you have filled to us. That does mean that the postage to send the additional vials for the next year will be something that you'll cover. That's fair.
Mike Brasher: We think that's fair.
Kayci Messerly: Yeah, if that's something that you are not willing to do, you can go ahead and hold on to those additional samples. They'll stay good. Sample vials that have an actual tissue sample in them, please do store them in the freezer until shipping them back. Vials that do not have a sample in them can be stored at room temperature. The buffer that we use is stable for long periods of time. So that is okay to keep at room temperature. You don't necessarily have to keep it frozen. But you don't have to worry about the buffer going bad. It is very stable for long periods of time.
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. Can I make a note? Do so. All right. Yeah. I just wanted to let everybody know, since you just told me there's about a thousand samples, I think we're almost at 800 samples, almost another 400 samples are going out tomorrow for sequencing in the following week. And so I just wanted to let everybody know to bear with us because come February 1st, we got inundated and we continue to with more and more samples obviously with hunting seasons ending and so forth that we had about 500 samples come in the last couple of weeks. So we're getting those ramped up and trying to get those out the door with all those should be processed here in the first week, first or second week of March. And then we'll get whatever trickles in finished as it comes in. So just bear with us and again, appreciate the timing.
Mike Brasher: I guess this is probably an important place to talk about sort of next year, what's happening from here. And I think this is about the same place this year where we were last year. We definitely want to continue this. We think we know there is interest. All of this relies on us having funding to make it happen. So we're at the time of the year where we honestly we don't know what that's going to look like next year. But we're working on it, and we have a few options and a few ideas. And so we're going to do our best to try to continue to bring this to you. We have, I'll just be totally honest, we have experimented with some ideas of maybe having participants help share some of the cost, whether it just be the shipping or some other small portion of it, to make this a little bit easier for us to continue forward. Because each of these samples, When you throw all the cost of this project in, including Katie and Kayci's time, and Ray's time, and my time, and Phil, and your staff, along with all the other supplies and the analyses, I think this turns out to be about $110, $120 per sample. So each of these kits, these three vial kits that we send out, when you take all the cost, factor all those in, it's about $300, $360 wrapped up in that. So it's not cheap. And we've wanted to do this for a number of reasons. The scientific value of it is at the top of that list. But then, of course, the connection that Ducks Unlimited gets from this connection with the hunters and the engagement we get there, there's tremendous value and enjoyment that we get out of that. So there's a lot of different reasons we want to do this. And there's multiple research questions that Phil and others can look into now and in the future from these data. We're just, we got to figure out a way to sort of keep it going. And so don't be surprised if, as we go forward this into the summer and fall, we propose a few changes. We wanted to wait until we had everything really fine-tuned before we entertained any type of sharing of the cost because we want to make sure we're delivering the best quality product possible. There is still, I think we would all love to be able to turn the results around more quickly, but there are some just capacity limitations in Phil's lab. And some of these, the samples or the data have to be sent off for further analysis. So it's a number of steps involved in this. Phil, anything to add on any of those points from your end?
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of it. This is one of the largest treasure troves of data that I'm probably hopefully get several PhD and masters out of. But it's the only one that exists of this capacity for any wild system. So I hope this continues because there's some serious questions that could be answered. On top of it, yeah, the whole timeline, it's kind of hard, right? Hunting season, Northern hunting seasons end right around Thanksgiving, Christmas and so forth. So those holidays are always a problem. And then Nobody wants to ship anything until that February 1st, right at the end of all the mid latitude and southern latitude hunting seasons. And so that sort of keeps us from being able to really optimize to get you turnaround times. So again, hopefully people can bear with us, but we're doing it as fast as we can. We're like a small tugboat pulling a very, very large ship. So again, huge thanks to everybody that participates, the funders to make this happen. I mean, this has gone beyond my wildest dreams and I hope that we can continue this ride.
Mike Brasher: If you're not subscribed or if you don't follow us on Instagram, at the DuckDNA, encourage you to do so. We also have a Facebook account. It is just DuckDNA. We just started it a few weeks ago. Despite my protestations, our social media folks said, we need to go ahead and do this. So that's getting underway. Follow us there as well. Anything else? Katie? Thank you for being a part of this project. Thank you for being part of the project, for sure. Kayci?
Kayci Messerly: We like to hear from you guys. I think if you guys have components of this process that has worked really well for you, please, that feedback is good for us as well. So if we do continue or in the capacity that we continue on the project, Getting that feedback is really helpful. Same if there have been components that are a little more challenging or haven't gone as smoothly, that feedback is really beneficial for us so that we can grow and kind of smooth out any inefficiencies that are currently there. We love emails, we love advice. So like we said, we'll try and respond with feedback as we can in timely manners. But this feedback helps us improve and become more efficient.
Mike Brasher: Thank you, Kayci. Thank you, Katie, for being here. Phil, thank you as well. Ty Shero over here in the corner who has been… Ty, I'm not sure if you're working, if you're taking notes, but either way, it's all good. So Ty will be involved in some of this going forward as well. Those of you communicating with us can expect to have to see Ty being one of the communicators. But yeah, thanks to everybody that has been part of this. Thanks for the enthusiasm. Phil, parting words from you.
Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, thanks for that. I wanted to just say, just like you said, please reach out to me. I also appreciate everybody, pros, cons, what does this mean? Feel free to email me at plavretsky at utep.edu or get ahold of us on Instagram at lavretsky lab. Or if you can't spell my name, just look for duck guy that does genetics. And I'm sure you'll find me. And I'm happy to always respond. I try to respond as quickly as I can. And I always appreciate all the emails and thoughts and everything. So again, feel free to reach out. And again, a huge thanks for everybody who participated in making this thing happen. Thank you.
Mike Brasher: Thanks, Phil. Thanks also here in studio to our producer, Chris Isaac. Thanks to everybody out there in listener land and viewer land. We appreciate your support. We appreciate your enthusiasm and your passion for wetlands and waterfowl conservation and Duck DNA.