EP 505. Participate in duckDNA to Become Citizen Scientist!!

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today we do indeed have an amazing follow up and need to know in the world of duck hunting. This is where all of you real duck hunters listening can become citizen scientists and contribute meaningfully to the duck hunting world, duck hunting management and science. Joining me today is Dr. Phil Lavretsky from down in El Paso, Texas. Doctor Mike Brazier, Jared Henson, both with Ducks Unlimited. And we’re going to dive deep into the Duck DNA, which is now going into its year 2. Guys, how the heck are you?

Mike Brazier: We’re doing great here. We’re doing great.

Ramsey Russell: Good. Your studio looks great, I love what you’ve done with the new studio. It’s amazing looking.

Mike Brazier: Well, let’s be clear, Ramsey. It is Jared and I had nothing to do with it. It is Chris Isaac over here, our producer. He’s the one manning all the audio, video and a lot of other staff and departments have contributed to this and make it happen. It’s going to serve much more than the Ducks Unlimited podcast, and we’re excited about it for a whole number of reasons. So a lot more video content coming to, folks from Ducks Unlimited courtesy of all the swanky stuff we have here.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, the first question I’d like to address would be, and this is an open question to the entire panel, what is Duck DNA? I’d like to go back just a little bit. We covered this topic last year, but I’d like to start fresh for anybody listening that may be unaware that may have been living under a rock and be unaware of this exciting new program that Ducks Unlimited has put together. What is Duck DNA?

Mike Brazier: Phil, do you want to draw straws or you want me to just say go for it?

Phil Lavretsky: I can go for it and you can take over after that. Sound good?

Mike Brazier: Yeah, that sounds great. Go for it.

Introduction to the Duck DNA Program.

What duck DNA is, is this idea that there’s a whole bunch of duck hunters out there and every year millions of waterfowl are harvested. And if we could just harness that information somehow, we could start learning about these populations at level, at time and space that nothing else has been studied at before.

Phil Lavretsky: All right. Yeah. What duck DNA is, is this idea that there’s a whole bunch of duck hunters out there and every year millions of waterfowl are harvested. And if we could just harness that information somehow, we could start learning about these populations at level, at time and space that nothing else has been studied at before. And so this has sort of been a dream of mine for quite a while. And luckily enough, Mike over there at DU apparently had a similar idea and contacted me about 2 years ago, a year and a half. We went back and forth on it. Do you liked it? I obviously loved it. And we came up with the idea Duck DNA, and this is the first attempt to create a citizen science base amongst hunters. So that way you can participate and be a scientist and build datasets that would be otherwise impossible. It’s not like we could afford all these technicians to go all around the nation all the time and collect all these birds. So what we’re looking for is a piece of tongue and a bit of data on your bird, and we can start building this data set where we can ask questions of, how much hybridization is there? Where are these birds going? Why does this individual migrate at this time and go to this type of moist soil or this type of park or whatever it is that that’s occurring? we can look at it at the foundational level, looking at it at the genes, and then having that foundation overlay all the other information about that we could garner from the time and location to everything from weather severity of that exact point to what’s occurring on the landscape, what is on that landscape at that point look at that change across time to ask the question, how does that affect our populations, our waterfowl populations here in North America? So this is sort of the idea. And honestly, one thing that I was hoping people would get excited about is just being participants, right? We love bands where that bird come from. Well, now you can know exactly what that bird is at the molecular level. What the heck is this thing? And you could post it up on whatever channel and be like, what is this? And everybody thinks they’re a professor of it, and they’re like, that’s what that is. But then you can come in and say, no, this is what it really is. And knowing that at the molecular level for the hunter, give a bit back to the hunter and build that data set for waterfowl conservation now and into the future. Mike, you got anything else?

Mike Brazier: Yeah, let me add a few things. Ramsey, in my mind, this was like a perfect marriage of different parts of the waterfowl science and management community. And Phil is right. We had sort of this shared idea that came about, he’s probably had this idea long before I have. But as we started interviewing Phil a couple of years ago, learning about this on the DU podcast, yeah, the idea began to emerge in my mind and asked Phil for a few sample vials 2 winters ago so that I could test run some of this stuff, knowing in my mind what all was going to be involved. And we said, okay, that seemed to work all right as a test run. So last summer, we pulled multiple departments within Ducks Unlimited together, along with Phil, laid out all the logistics of what would need to happen to execute this the way we would want it done. And it was not an easy task. So Phil and his team are the brains behind the genetics and the analysis, and then Ducks Unlimited can bring all sorts of logistics to it to enable that connection with the hunting community to create an enjoyable, rewarding, user participatory experience. We had everyone from, we had multiple departments involved in this. Our IT department, our web team team, our fundraising development team, obviously, our conservation team, creative services, they created the logo. Our legal team had to look into a few things related to the website and the logo and trademark. I mean, so we’ve tried to cover all the bases, but it really is perfect marriage between an academic partner and what Ducks Unlimited can bring from all of the other different elements. So that website that I just kind of referenced, if you haven’t seen it, haven’t been to it, duckdna.com, you can go there, learn more about it, and that’s where you can also apply to participate in this. And so let me also just give a shout out to the people that kind of work behind the scenes to have helped make this happen. Some by name, Ashley Tunstall, Kai Victor, Ray Moore, Katie Tucker, Virgie Moosni, they’re the ones that kind of do all of the hard work behind the scenes. And Phil and I and a few others end up sort of being the voice and name of this thing. But there’s an army of people behind us that really are the ones that make it happen.

Ramsey Russell: Why is this project so important here in North America? We’ve been all over these topics, Phil, you and I, in the past, and I know you all have talked about it extensively on Ducks Unlimited’s podcast. But just as a reminder, why is this genetic level research important? How will this data be used to characterize North American waterfowl populations and to ultimately manage it? What’s going on with the North American population that we need to know more about these genetics?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, I mean, I’ll just start with the terms that I like to think about, which is, we don’t know until we know, you know? And so this is the type of data that we need to obtain to be able to even ask the question, like, is there a problem on the landscape at the molecular level? Are there issues on inbreeding or anything like that? But the thing that really spurred this whole thing is obviously mallards. If you haven’t heard about it, there’s an issue between wild and game farm mallards. And this is something that my team has dove deep into and is a big part of my research program. And so one thought that we had was we could use system like this, an opportunity like this, to monitor what genetically, what is occurring on the landscape. We don’t yet have the tools to give to hunters to assess whether this mallard is truly wild North American or something else. And so what we want to do is ask the question, what is happening on the landscape? I’ve got partners, federal and state and all of that. But what this program does is allow us to not only monitor mallards across the entire nation, but also across time. As the season gets long, October, November, December, and January, we can look at what are those proportions of wild versus feral and hybrid, and where are they being found and what is occurring on that landscape. And those proportions can then be fed back into population models or anything like that, that effectively establish seasons or game seasons for mallards. That’s a bit of data that we could start to supply annually to the federal and state levels for them to sort of make those kinds of decisions. But on top of it is just asking the question, how bad is it? And where is it that it’s bad?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Brazier: Ramsay, if I could jump in here, I want to offer some thoughts from DU’s perspective, great example again of this partnership where Phil, the researcher in this partnership, lays out those questions and identifies the people that need answers to those questions. From Ducks Unlimited’s perspective, we want to support our partners, federal, state partners, our university partners, in collecting the data. They formulate the questions because they’re the ones making the decisions. And so we see this as a tremendous opportunity for us to play a role that we, I think we’re well positioned to play, especially in this new era of participatory or citizen science. And so that’s what we’re trying to do, is engage hunters with these researchers and decision makers. They’re providing the information makers are going to need and use. And so from our standpoint, I just want to be clear that the research questions that Phil laid out, they’re of interest to Ducks Unlimited because they’re of interest to our state and federal partners. We’re just facilitating that connection and providing the data, and they’re going to be the ones to identify the really cool questions and go forward with whatever needs to be done in that regard.

Jared Henson: I want to step in real quick, too, and just say, I wanted to thank, and Phil hit on it earlier. Leveraging waterfowl hunters as citizen scientists. We know waterfowl hunters like to contribute right. Think of band data. Band data from waterfowl is way higher than any other bird species. So if we knew we could leverage that, that would be an awesome opportunity. And that was something Phil mentioned. I just wanted to put it out there in that way.

Phil Lavretsky: No, absolutely. I mean, Ramsey. Yeah. So, I look at the data and I start to formalize, yeah, I’m one of the few people that actually see everything. And so I started asking the question, for example, why do so many of us think that a male black duck is a female mallard? Like, that’s still a difficulty amongst us hunters. Maybe we can create something that helps them identify them better. One other thing is there seems to be, when we start looking at other types of hybrids, pintail gadwall, other things like that. One question that I had was, does that switch year to year, the types of hybrids and where they are located, depending on where mallards settle? If they settle in more pintail habitat, do we get more pintail mallard hybrids? If they settle in more gadwall habitat, do we get a bunch of brewers ducks those years? And if there’s a bias in males, does that translate in as that bias, more and more male mallard on the landscape, does that translate to more of these types of hybrids? These kinds of questions started to pop up in my head because I started to see interesting patterns of where there were wigeon mallard hybrids versus gadwall mallard hybrids. So those started to, as we garner that kind of information, more of these types of questions will be able to ask an answer.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Last year, when you all implemented this talk about how you all went through the process of finding applicants, participants, how it was rolled out, how many people applied and participated, and what species were targeted.

Mike Brazier: I can start on that. And, Phil, what we need to do is we need to side bet this year. We need to side bet on sort of the over under number of applicants. So we’ll have to talk about that offline. We didn’t do that last year. We didn’t document what we thought it was going to be. So what we did last year, Ramsey, we identified that we wanted, and we just pulled this number out of the air. It was last year was a pilot year, this year, technically, is still a pilot year. We’re still learning. We said, let’s send out five vials per kit and I guess we kind of backed into this from a financial standpoint as well as a capacity standpoint with Phil’s lab. And we thought, 1500 samples is probably a good place to start on the top end. And so if we wanted to do 5 vials per participant, then simple math tells you that’s 300 participants, right? So that’s kind of where we started. And so we knew that we were going to be able to enroll only 300 participants at that full level, 5 vial per kit level, whenever we rolled this out, duckdna.com, there’s a little button there, it says, apply now. It asks you to provide your name and the state in which you normally hunt. Because we wanted that last bit of information, because we want to ensure that we get good coverage across the US, lower 48 states only right now is what we’re doing. Did that last year and that we’re continuing that this year. And once this thing began to, I guess, become known, a couple of things happened and the number of applicants picked up substantially, well, by early January, we had 4200 applicants. I think we had another 500 or 600 people that signed up to be notified between the end of the duck season and sort of the start of this season. So whenever we sent out emails a few days ago letting people know that the application period is opening back up for the 2024-2025 season, and I think that email went out to about 4800 people. As of last week, we already had 1800 people apply. And so this year we’re going to be increasing the number of applicants from 300 to somewhere in the neighborhood of 700. We’re reducing the number of vials per kit, though, because we’re wanting greater representation, greater participation. But we’re still kind of bumping up against that capacity in the lab right now. So that’s where we are. Anything else to cover there? I mean, I can describe how we’re going to select the participants. It’s sort of a, we stratify it by state and achieve a minimum number of selected participants per state. And so we filter that data set by state and then we randomly select a certain number of participants applicants and we stagger it. We’re going to be staggering the drawing process. We’re going to be drawing our first sample here in a few weeks. We’ll draw 100 to 150. Those will come from people that are hunting in states at northern latitudes. We won’t be drawing names from any of the states at southern latitudes just yet. Every other week or so, we’re going to be drawing another tranche of 100 participants. And we’re going to continue that until we get into December. Ramsey, let me make sure I don’t forget this, doing something where if you don’t get selected as a regular participant but you shoot a hybrid individual, you can still contact us duckdna@ducks.org, have our own email set up for this thing. It’s duckdna@ducks.org. You can contact us and we will send you out a single vial hybrid kit is kind of what we’re calling it. Participation is totally free. The postage is prepaid. Return postage prepaid. So that is made possible by the generosity of Ducks Unlimited donors, we thank them for everything that they’re doing to make this possible. And that’s where we are.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. What did you all find out last year? That’s what I want to get into is what were the results last year? What did all these duck hunter citizen scientists uncover? What were some of the real interesting things that you all got into and the revelations we should say?

Mike Brazier: Ramsay, I’ll start by just directing people to duckdna.com, they’re on the homepage, there’s a little button you can click and it’ll take you to the results for this past year. It summarizes the number of applicants, number of states, we even did get some people from Alaska, but we didn’t enroll them yet. We might actually send some out to Alaska, we haven’t really talked about that, we may have to build in some higher postage, return postage. We’ll figure that out. We had 52 participants from the Atlantic flyway 108 from the Mississippi, 64 from the central, 42 from the Pacific. And then we’ve got also breakdowns by flyway for the samples that are received. I have just a couple of notes here, Ramsey, and then I’m going to turn it over to Phil. We detected genetic material from 15 different duck species across all of those that were submitted, this is one of the more interesting things that, to me is that we found quite a number of 3 species, hybrids, which would be, I’m going to let Phil talk about that here in a second, he can explain what all that is. There are also some interesting findings regarding hybrids. The brewers duck, gadwall mallard, and sort of the sex composition, which was the which species was which, and then quite a few other, from the wild mallard ancestry, percentage of wild mallard ancestry, we have a graph on that website. Just my take on this, I don’t think we’re ready to draw broad conclusions about anything that we have found from this data set, it’s only 700 samples across 48 states. So we’ve got a long way to go before we have a robust sample from which to draw your broad inference. So that’s my view of it. Phil, I’ll let you talk about some of those things.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, no, I agree. I was trying to think of, like, things that are concrete and it’s really more, less concrete and more questions that I basically have found in this data set. So you started on the 3 species account. I actually didn’t think about this and I should have. Why wouldn’t a mallard that is part wild and part game farm not interbreed with a black duck, let’s say or a mottled duck if it has a chance? And I just didn’t think about it until I started seeing these data sets. And what we consistently were finding is that those 3 species data sets were either with a black duck, an American black duck, or a Florida mottled duck, those are where I kept finding it. Moving into Florida, folks that did send mottled ducks in, unfortunately, not one of them was a pure mottled duck. But it’s only about 10 bird – Yeah, that blew my mind because we had about the same amount of West Gulf coast, Western Gulf coast mottled ducks come out of Louisiana and Texas, and almost all of them were pure mottled duck, just pure western Gulf coast mottled duck. But on the Florida side, I couldn’t find one good mottled duck. And that’s highly concerning the fact that, again, small number, about 8 or 10. But the fact is, is that we should have found at least 1 or 2, and all of them were a mix with game farm. Now the other part that I found interesting is that I would have had, I thought we’d find an elevated amount of hybrids, these other more natural hybrids with pintail and gadwall and stuff like that, that it is game farm that are driving it. But in fact, I don’t think we found one of those as being game farm. Every single time it was a brewer’s duck, we found a couple wood duck mallard hybrids. What is there? I think there was a teal mallard, there’s a couple pintail mallard, and they were all wild, which was completely surprising to me. I thought it would be a shift towards game farm, trading it. Now what that might be a result of is that the type of mallard that is found in the prairie potholes, or in areas where there’s secondary nesting of these other prairie ducks. Only real wild mallards are probably up there at that time, because that’s who’s surviving and migrating up there in the spring. At least that’s what our telemetry data is starting to show. And so that’s a bit of a shift. I would have expected game farms to have these other effects on all these birds, but in fact, it is wild mallards. And the other part of it is that we did find, as Mike alluded to, that we both found all the time we only really see male hybrids, male brewer duck hybrids, or male pintail mallard hybrids. And so the thought was always, is it because females don’t exist due to genetic issues, or is it because people can’t really identify a female hybrid because it kind of looks like a brown version of that duck? But in fact, what we were able to find here with a few of the hybrid participants, is that there are female, both wigeon mallard and then we also found brewers duck, where it was a female hybrid vetted first generation. The other part of it is that a question that is always, well, are they viable? Are brewers duck viable? And we did find us F2 or second generation out of California that suggests that was 75%, I think, gadwall and 25% mallard. So that means that first hybrid, that first brewers back crossed into a gadwall and made babies that were 75, 25, suggesting that they aren’t entirely, they must be viable to some extent. And now, with this type of collaboration and all these folks out there, in my mind, not like for you, but in my mind, I may get a hybrid out in the boons for maybe one or two in my lifetime, and that’s just not enough. But if we can get the nation backed up, and everybody’s getting one or two every single year, we can build those data sets so much faster. There was a hybrid study maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and they took, I don’t know, gosh, they took like 5 or 6 years to just get, like 20 to 25 of these hybrids, and we blew them out of the water in one year with all the participants. And so again, these are things that I’m seeing, our sample sizes are still low, but as we get more participants on the landscape, more of these birds, and what’s occurring on the landscape is going to be visible to us, and we’re going to start to be able to answer some of these questions that are starting to arise in my mind and me noting them down when I look at the datasets and stuff like that. So yeah, we’re starting to learn, those are just a few of the things that popped up in my mind, the 3 species thing, Florida mottled ducks not doing so hot, those were the most interesting and concerning respectively. But then also looking at the hybrids and where they’re found, I will note that a lot of those hybrids, those brewers ducks and others were coming out of the Mississippi, right? So is that due to there being more hunters there and that’s just where they’re coming from? Or is it that those hybrids are being formed in the prairie potholes and the Mississippi alluvial valley is the nexus or the endpoint of those birds during their migration. So that’s why we’re picking them up there. And those are all kinds of questions that are starting to be in my mind. And as we go into year two, to start asking those kinds of questions and patterns or maybe it shifts to the Pacific or the Central Valley, maybe get a bunch of hybrids if some dynamics is off or different, I just don’t know, hopefully we’ll know soon.

Why Hunters Are the Right Audience for Duck DNA.

I mean we’re going to the right audience, which is the hunters, the ones that just really geek out about all this kind of stuff. It’s not that scientists aren’t geeky, we certainly can be, but we just aren’t, I don’t know, we just know that information exists, know those things exist and then hunters are just so much more, I don’t know, keenly intrigued by those phenomena.

Mike Brazier: Hey Ramsey, one question that I, or one thing I wanted to add to what Phil just talked about there in terms of this other study that came before took several years and then they got a small number of hybrids submitted, and I remember that, and I remember seeing that request for hybrid samples and it went to the professional community and Phil made the note, reminded me of this, the disparity I guess, in the number of samples they received over 3 or 4 years and the number that we received from hybrid verge just in one year, and I’m like, that makes total sense. It’s the wrong audience. I mean we’re going to the right audience, which is the hunters, the ones that just really geek out about all this kind of stuff. It’s not that scientists aren’t geeky, we certainly can be, but we just aren’t, I don’t know, we just know that information exists, know those things exist and then hunters are just so much more, I don’t know, keenly intrigued by those phenomena. And so by connecting with the hunters, we were able to get so much more information. And that’s just again a testament to hunters and what they can bring to all of us.

Ramsey Russell: It’s because hunters are conservationist, bottom line, no doubt about it. Here’s a couple of questions I’ve got before we get to move on and forget about this stuff right here. The blond mallard that you see all over the Internet, I just dismissed them as all got game farm genetics. Were there any instances that you found some significant blonde or silver or color variations that were, in fact, wild?

Phil Lavretsky: Only in one. And it wasn’t a mallard.

Ramsey Russell: What was it?

Mike Brazier: You want me to show that?

Ramsey Russell: Post it up and show it, Mike.

Mike Brazier: All right, so we got a PowerPoint here again, what we can do with the video. So can you get it there? There we go. There’s title slide. All right, and so there we go. That was a bird that was submitted by Mike Weck. A lot of the viewers and listeners may have actually seen some coverage of this, there was a fair bit in the media. And so, Phil, when you first, if you would have just seen that photo, what would you have thought it was?

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, I saw it. And I was like, oh, yeah, it’s a female game farm mallard, that weird look or some sort of hybrid-ish kind of thing.

Mike Brazier: But I have the certificate, we can do the reveal.

Phil Lavretsky: Do you want me to say it or you’re going to put the certificate?

Mike Brazier: No, I’ve got the certificate. We’re going to do the reveal.

Phil Lavretsky: Are we doing it right now? So this is what people get, right? So everybody applies. Everybody who applies, and the data is good, get this kind of certificate of pedigree, and it tells you exactly what it is. This was the most surprising one to me, actually. When I run all my analyses, I don’t have any of those pictures. I just do what I have to do, and I have no concept of any of the individuals or history or knowledge of them. And so this happened, and actually, Mike Weck contacted me, and they’re like, are you serious this thing is a black duck? And then I have to go back to my data sets and be like, yeah, that’s it. I even went back to the analyses to make sure of it. Is there any chance that it could be in the gray? But this thing was 100%. There was, like, no gray with less than 2% in standard deviation. And so I was like, yeah, this thing is certain. And it had a new world maternal or the mitochondrial lineage didn’t even have an old world A. And so what this bird showed us is that some proportion of American black ducks, and this is a female, so at least females will show this, that kind of blonde plumage, as you mentioned, that we might see in mallards. Apparently, we see it in American black ducks as well. What extent is it? I have no idea. What’s the total population of American black ducks these days? I guess 500,000 or 600,000. So it’s one in 600,000 at this point until we know it. But that is the first – So this is a great case of what duck DNA could do in partnership, right? There’s this cool duck. Everybody would have just said everything under the sun of what that thing might be. And lo and behold, the foundation of it is actually American black duck. And again, even I would have looked at it and been like, no, it’s some sort of mallard thing. But the genetics, the thing about genetics is it’s the only thing in life that doesn’t lie. And so it’s not that, like, that bird can run away from that plumage, it’s just part of its genetics for one reason or another. And birds like that, especially with ones with pictures, we could go back when we have more of these and start asking, actually, are there specific genes that explain that plumage? Like, why did that happen? When we compare a bird that looks like that versus an American black duck, as you would expect, nice and dark. Are there genes? Are there mutations that resulted in it? And then we could basically say, what’s the probability of that mutation arising? One in x? And we can actually create a probability for folks to say, you got a 1 in a 10,000 chance or 1 in 100,000 chance, basically doing that. And then once we overlay that on a bunch of maps, folks can start looking at this like, as if it’s on x and be like, I really want to shoot a hybrid of this type of, where are these hybrids located? Or where’s the probability of me getting that kind of hybrid? I can only imagine that kind of information being of interest to a bunch of hunters. So it’s interesting to me.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic.

Mike Brazier: Ramsey, the story behind that particular bird was pretty interesting. And thanks to Mike for allowing us to use the photo and contributing some of the promo of all this. So, apparently, the story goes that he brought this bird home and he was talking to his wife, and there was a question like, well, what is it? What species is it? And I think his wife made the comment of like, well, surely there’s somebody out there that does DNA testing on ducks. He was probably like, no, nobody’s going to be doing that. She said, well, let me just get online and look. Lo and behold, she landed on duckdna.com. send an email to us, and the rest is history. So that was a really cool development.

Ramsey Russell: One of the most interesting things you all discovered understanding it’s a small sample size, but I have always heard and believed that if I laid my hands on a hybrid of any species worldwide, it was almost certainly – in the instance, a brewer duck. It was always going to be a mallard hybrid, it was always going to be the big green headed Drake. He’s bigger, he’s assertive, and the female is going to be the other species. But you all learn something totally different with respect to brewers ducks. That really blew my mind. It completely blew my mind.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, apparently it goes both ways. We found it. Because the mitochondrial lineage essentially tells us who the maternal lineage is, who mom was. And then we can infer dad. And we found it both ways, where dad was the drake mallard. And another time, the dad was actually a gadwall. And so, yeah, I too. I wouldn’t have thought it went both ways. I always thought it was the mallard that was instigating, and it was the drake mallard instigating all of these sort of hybridization events. And again, even further, I thought it was a game farm mallard this whole time, now, knowing what I know on it. But to be fair, brewer’s duck, when it was first identified in the 1800s, there weren’t really game farm mallards here. So we know that this has been occurring for a long time, right? You go to the Smithsonian, there’s birds out of the 1800s there for brewers ducks and others. So we know that this has been occurring naturally on the landscape. And now with these types of data sets, we can ask, what is the proportion, general proportion of these birds on the landscape, any one year, how frequent is this occurring?

Ramsey Russell: How many brewers ducks did you all encounter during and Duck DNA? I mean, I’m just curious because for Audubon to have named it, I’ve always wondered, did he find just one? Did he lay his hands on a hybrid and say, oh, this is a new species? Or were they more prevalent back in the day, wherever he was sampling this stuff? I’ve always wondered that. How common is this hybridization?

Mike Brazier: Well, it was at least 3 or 4.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, no, I know. I was going to ask you for the number that we got, but I know the story of – So, yeah, so he was, I believe, in Nova Scotia or somewhere in the northeast, and he got into a group of them and he shot them. So he’s like, oh, there’s more than one. And that’s why it was called a brewer’s duck, because he thought there were more of them. And the thought is that he just so happened to get into a group of probably siblings and saw a bunch of them and we’re like, oh, yeah, this is a species. But that’s the story, how it goes. And then he never saw them again.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Phil Lavretsky: So he’s like, oh, there must have been only a few of them and they’re probably stick now.

Ramsey Russell: Well, not to run down too far down a rabbit hole, but wouldn’t you like to have been able to sample Labrador ducks back in the day? Maybe they stumbled across the Labrador ducks and it was just a small family cohort of hybrids.

Phil Lavretsky: That’s right. Yeah. That’s actually my current hypothesis on Labrador ducts. And thankfully there’s enough of them. There’s about 20, there’s about 10 at the Smithsonian, about 10 scattered at LSU and others, and I’ve got a colleague that has the DNA and we’re working with her to actually ask that question because now we have references for all sea ducks and all the other ducks. So we can actually ask, is this a unique species or was it a unique species? And if so, maybe we can use the DNA to actually bring it back to life. Or was it a hybrid combination between, long tail or something of that nature, some eider or something like that? Because to be fair, what’s it called, steller’s eider, is actually what we found is to be a hybrid between true eider and a long tail duck. And that was a historical hybrid.

Ramsey Russell: No wonder why it’s “danger”.

Phil Lavretsky: Right. Well, they’re still around. There’s a lot of them. Well, a lot of them for a hybrid. So they were successful as a hybrid. But what that story tells you is that you’re right that thing might have just been a hybrid population at that time as well. Just kind of getting going and then kind of got shot at.

Ramsey Russell: Crazy things we learned. The other question I’ve got ahead, Mike.

Mike Brazier: Yeah. If you want to, I have several photos of those gadwall mallard hybrids.

Ramsey Russell: Show them, by all means.

Mike Brazier: So here’s the first one. Yeah, I don’t know if there’s anything talk about here, but other than just those are the photos that we received. And of course, most people are familiar enough with brewers ducks, if they’ve been around long enough, they would have probably recognized that or had a reasonable guess. And there we go. We know that, fellas. And so there’s the 53% gadwall, 40% wild mallard, so an F1 hybrid, I don’t see. Yeah, that’s the male. And so then here’s the data, the mitochondrial data tells us which was a female, which was a male. This was a male mallard and a female gadwall responsible for this offspring. And so that’s what Phil was talking about is typically what we would expect to be responsible for producing that hybridization. So here we can go to this one, it’s another brewer’s duck. And this one was provided by Bear Stroud, 55% Gadwall, 45% wild mallard, it’s a male. And this, however, was a male gadwall by female mallard. Again, the mitochondrial tells us that. So the mitochondrial would have been signature for a mallard, right, Phil?

Phil Lavretsky: That’s right. Yeah. So there’s your two cases where it was one way and the other way, and having those pictures in hand, we can start characterizing also, like, what is a brewer’s duck? Is it always completely random? Is it always going to show certain features? Those are some interesting questions that we’ll be asking as we continue to build those data sets as well.

Ramsey Russell: When you looked at this sample size, small though it may have been, and I’m thinking of the non-hybrid portion of the data you all collected. Are you concerned that about the game farm genetics? Did it make you feel better about the situation, or arise from concern that we got too much game farm genetic on the horizon.

Phil Lavretsky: I’m assuming you want me to answer that, Mike.

Mike Brazier: Yeah, go for it, man.

The Role of the Duck DNA Program in Monitoring Trends.

When we’re looking at banded birds, when we’re working with the state and the feds and others, that it’s not great. The one thing that it did illuminate is that it’s got an effect, at least on American black ducks and a bit on mottled ducks because they also hybridize with those.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, generally speaking, they were pretty much on par with the Atlantic side with what we’re seeing with our other data sets. When we’re looking at banded birds, when we’re working with the state and the feds and others, that it’s not great. The one thing that it did illuminate is that it’s got an effect, at least on American black ducks and a bit on mottled ducks because they also hybridize with those. But those are the only two. Like I said, I thought other hybrids would be game farm, but they’re not. The one interesting thing though, is when we got birds out of Montana and some of the Dakotas, we still picked that stuff up. And that’s the concerning part. It was at a lower prevalence. It’s still a very low prevalence, but it’s at a higher rate than what I was picking up, 2010 and then again in the 2019 and 2020. So it seems like it’s ticking up, and that’s a concern of mine. And why program like this, this is why I thought of this – why I thought this program would be a phenomenal, is that we could actually ask what is the proportion of these birds contributing every generation into the flock, into the fall harvest so we can monitor this, is it declining, increasing stable? At this point, I would say it’s increasing in these western flyways and that’s a concern of mine, at least that’s concerning to me.

Ramsey Russell: So it’s more widespread from coast to coast than you had hoped, but it’s still a relatively small percent of mallards that are polluted with these game farm genetics.

Phil Lavretsky: As you go into the central and pacific, yeah, and they’re highly back cross, meaning the ones that are being shot are mostly wild. Now, what our work is trying to do is ask the question, how wild do you have to be for us to consider you wild again? So maybe 80% wild 3 generations back across and you’ve already got all the good genes. And at that point, we should just consider it wild. And all’s is good. Is it 10%, is it 15%? Those are kinds of questions that we’re asking within my team right now, but currently just being able to distinguish between those two and asking the question how much of it is in there? It’s increasing in prevalence, but that prevalence is still very low. And statistically, much lower than what we would be if you hunted in the Great Lakes, lakes or somewhere in the northeast in the Atlantic flyway.

Jared Henson: Yeah, Phil, I got a follow up on that. Kind of is there in the Great Lakes Atlantic region and over into the Mississippi flyways where you’re seeing that trickle over, is there a latitudinal gradient that’s coming up kind of as a trend in the results you’ve gotten in.

Phil Lavretsky: Which one, just in the Mississippi?

Jared Henson: The Great Lakes, Atlantic or Great Lakes population and in Mississippi. Is there a latitudinal gradient based on birds that still end up in, say, Mississippi or Arkansas versus those that are sampled higher up?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So the Mississippi, it’s a stark contrast. So if you go south of Tennessee, you pretty much have a 90 plus percent chance that you’re shooting wild birds. If you’re north of Tennessee and you’re in the Great Lakes, Ohio region, you got this point depending on what state you’re at, you’ve got about less than 40% chance that you’re shooting a wild bird. I mean, that’s all better than if, like, let’s say in Connecticut where you’ve got less than 2%, or jersey or somewhere else. Now, what’s interesting in the Atlantic flyway, I say these general terms, but then when we look at New York versus Connecticut or Jersey or Rhode Island, New York’s better, so you’ve got about a 50-50 chance. But then again, once you hit those seashore states, you just drop tremendously. What’s the cause of that? I’m not 100% sure. I know that maybe it’s the total number of releases there versus New York. Maybe New York’s close to the border, being close to Quebec. You’re getting an influx of those wild birds more than the other states. Those are good questions. We just finished out a project in South Carolina, kind of going north and south, where we were looking at that. And again, better proportions than some of the other states. You’re better than 60%, 65%, 70% chance of being wild and the birds that are coming to South Carolina are also highly back crossed. Maybe it’s just the birds that have kind of recaptured their wildness that are able to even come to South Carolina, that’s one of the questions that we’re interested in asking. But, yeah, there’s a very stark contrast in Mississippi, some contrast in the Atlantic flyway. But then as you go into the central and Pacific, I just don’t have the data set to tell you exactly what’s happening. But I will say that when we do find a hybrid in those, they are extremely back across, meaning they’re like, less than 20% of it is game farm heritage. So that means one more generations of pair bonding with a wild bird, and those kids will probably just be 100% wild. And so there’s obviously this interesting dynamic, not every flyway, not every state is the same.

Jared Henson: Yeah, I brought that up because I participated last year. And of my 5 mallards that I sent in, I think all of them were, with the exception of one wild hybrid, which I don’t know if we’ll talk about or not. All of mine were 95 plus percent wild. Okay. And then I think 3 of them were 98 plus percent one was 95, and the other one was a black duck wild mallard hybrid.

Phil Lavretsky: So there you go.

Jared Henson: So, yeah, but those all came from Arkansas, so I was curious if there was –

Phil Lavretsky: That totally makes sense for Arkansas. Yeah, so when you –

Jared Henson: South Arkansas.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So when we partnered with Doug Osborne, I keep sending him vials, because I’m like, oh, there’s got to be hybrids there. And every time I think we’ve done maybe 600 or 700 now samples out of Arkansas by itself. And, yeah, it’s few and far between. those are birds that are being pulled into Arkansas, into the lower Mississippi alluvial Valley are wild. And that’s got to be an instinctual connection. And what appears to be out of the Dakotas not appears. That’s what the genetics say. And the telemetry data say, honestly, the few birds that Doug put telemetry units on that went to the Great Lakes were almost all hybrids. So the ones that went to the Great Lakes were hybrids, all the ones that went to the prairies were wild. So there’s obviously this instinctual linkage between those locations that date to their evolution. My guess, though, is what’s happening to the Great Lakes is impacting what you used to call Halloween mallards. That was probably your cohort that used to come in as a secondary push that appears to not even like to come south of Tennessee. And God, like 60% of them do these, like, random, weird migratory walks, they’re not even migrations, they’re just random walks on the landscape. And with increasing influence of them going to the Atlantic flyway, actually these days.

Jared Henson: So just much more facultative, moving as needed, not as kind of a –

Phil Lavretsky: And the problem is that they can’t move. So that they move, but their ability to move is hindered and as you increase the amount of game farm ancestry, their ability to move long distances statistically decreases by a lot, their stopovers increase, the longevity of those stopovers increase, their propensity to go to more urban versus rural habitats increases. We now know all of these things, and they’re all genetically linked, and they’re all genetically linked to the amount of game farm they have. And so that has a clear implication to that individual’s ability to survive and breed and migrate on the landscape. And so that is obviously impacting or has some form of impact on population dynamics out of the Great Lakes and for the Atlantic flyway as well. And obviously, if you looked at it well, those are the two locations that continue to decline in population size or have lower fecundity or survival estimates out of the IMPs that are coming out. So interesting dynamics.

Mike Brazier: Hey, Phil, follow up question on some of that. And I was like Jared in having one bird that I harvested and sent in for testing, coming back as a hybrid. It was a hybrid mallard, wild mallard, and hybrid an American black duck. I’m looking at the percentages here, 78% wild Mallard, 16% American black duck, so two things I want you to first describe. Explain why those two percentages don’t add to 100, 78 and 16. So what’s going on there? Help people sort of understand some of the results. And then I’m going to ask you just sort of about the physical appearance of this bird, as I observed and Jared as well.

Jared Henson: My bird was almost identical to this.

Mike Brazier: Why doesn’t it add to 100?

Phil Lavretsky: It doesn’t add up because there’s standard deviation. We use genetic information. What’s called bootstrap. So ask the program, assign ancestry a thousand times using a random amount of genes. So all of this ancestry isn’t called with, like, 5 or 6 markers, we’re doing 20,000 to 30,000 markers across the genome on par with 23 and me or ancestry.com for humans. And so what we tell these programs and say, don’t just estimate it once, estimated a thousand times using a random number of markers, and then that provides us an error rate basically plus minus some amount. And that’s why it doesn’t add up to 100 every time, because there’s a plus minus there for both of those assignment probabilities. So that’s that answer. The important thing about all of that is our error rates, typically, black ducks are the hardest ones because they’re so closely related to mallards that our error rates are somewhere between 5% and 7% sometimes. But our error rates, when we’re looking at game farm, ancestry or pintail or mallard are less than 2%. Again, on par with 23 and me or ancestry.com, they don’t give you their error rates, but that is what they have. So that tells us we have robust data sets, the ancestry is robust, we can trust it. So that answers that question, I hope.

Mike Brazier: Yeah, it does. Okay, so now my question is related to the answer that you just gave whenever I shot that bird and wanted to do the testing on it, it looked like a pure mallard. There was no. I mean, it had the curls, it had every phenotypic physical trait of a wild 100% mallard male mallard that I could identify. And then it came back to be an F2 mallard black duck cross, Jared had the same thing. Does that surprise you like that with one back cross where you’ve got the F1 generation hybrid mallard black duck, then that offspring would have back crossed with a mallard. Does it surprise you then that the offspring of that breeding would revert to an appearance so close to a wild mallard?

Understanding the Similarity Between Black Ducks and Mallards.

It looks like there’s just a few pieces of DNA that are basically explain if you’re a black duck or you’re a mallard. And so the way we theorized or thought about this, and I published this in 2019 as a hypothesis, where we had a bit of data on it, and the empirical data really suggested it took only maybe 2 generations, and it would flip flop between the species. So if you just take black duck, those black duck genes, and you cut and paste mallard into them, that’s effectively what’s happening when they back cross.

Phil Lavretsky: No. And in fact, those are the two species that I would expect that to happen. It’s because they’re so closely related. We’re coming out with a paper looking at the whole genome of those two, and there aren’t a lot of things that are actually different between them. It looks like there’s just a few pieces of DNA that are basically explain if you’re a black duck or you’re a mallard. And so the way we theorized or thought about this, and I published this in 2019 as a hypothesis, where we had a bit of data on it, and the empirical data really suggested it took only maybe 2 generations, and it would flip flop between the species. So if you just take black duck, those black duck genes, and you cut and paste mallard into them, that’s effectively what’s happening when they back cross. You’re cutting and pasting, and potentially, those genes are so important together that they all cut and paste together. So it only takes one, maybe two generations to fully be effectively 100% one species or the other that we couldn’t even tell you apart and that’s exactly what we’re seeing with black ducks. It’s just there’s not a lot of differences between those two species that it makes sense. It doesn’t take very long or very many back crossing events for them to have kids that effectively look like one or the other parent. That makes sense.

Mike Brazier: Yeah, it does. Appreciate that.

Ramsey Russell: What about the –

Mike Brazier: What else you got? No, I was going to ask you back Ramsey –

Ramsey Russell: I want to ask about Florida mottled duck a little bit more.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is your initial findings down in Florida with regards the Florida mottled duck? We all now begin to focus more or send some special sampling kits out to that part of the world, try to dig a little bit deeper on that species? That concerns me, to be honest with you.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, I don’t think we have any special calls, but I hope we can get good representation of folks out of Florida hunting, because the question now becomes, is it just so happens that a few participants that we had where they hunt near Disney or something like that, and they’re just getting influx of those hybrids, or is it statewide? I know that Florida just is about to hire a biologist specific mottled ducks and other birds is, I think, the description of that position. So I’m hoping to work with them and see if we can. If they’re going to be banding birds if we can’t get a few of those bled because yeah, that’s quite concerning, if that’s the case. Is it possible? Absolutely. Small population size, a few locations where large numbers can overlap, they’re non-migratory, you’ve got a huge influx of game farming, domestic animals we know that are present in Florida for a variety of reasons. So that situation is definitely possible. It mimics what we saw, what occurred on Hawaii. So we know it’s this kind of like complete genetics. So what we call genetic extinction event is possible with the right numbers and the fact that I can’t find one. Again, sample size small, but the fact that I couldn’t find at least one, that’s quite concerning. In fact, I had a buddy, I wanted a Florida mottled duck mount for this exhibit that we were putting on, and we still have at the University of Texas, El Paso. And he shot two, sent me them, I was like, neither of them are 100%. Can you shoot a couple more? And it took maybe 4 or 5, and then finally I got one, I was like, oh, yeah, that’s a mottled deck. So the trend seemed to be on par, that maybe things aren’t looking great, and that’s a problem. Because like I said, mottled ducks out of Texas, out of Louisiana, I think I only found one hybrid, but it was easy to find 100% pure western Gulf coast mottled ducks. But that’s just not the case for Florida.

Mike Brazier: Yeah, Ramsey. That’s one of the other things that Phil just hit on it there at the very end. But I just want to make it a little bit more specific is that whenever he’s looking at sort of the genetic signature for a mottled duck, he’s able to differentiate between a Florida mottled duck genetics wise, and a western Gulf coast mottled duck. And so those are some of the other things that were pretty cool. I need to go back into the database and see if we had any, I don’t recall us having a “hybrid” between a Florida and western Gulf coast.

Phil Lavretsky: One. It was in the north of Florida and this isn’t the first one I’ve seen. And it’s because of the population of mottled, it isn’t because of model ducks coming out of Texas, Louisiana. It’s that population of mottled ducks out of South Carolina. And we’ve seen a bit of that kind of mixing in the past.

Mike Brazier: And that is because birds from south-western Louisiana were translocated to South Carolina, right?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. What did they do? I’m trying to remember the numbers. There’s 2000, about 2000 western Gulf coast split between Texas and Louisiana, another couple hundred Florida into South Carolina when we published that paper in 22, asking the question, who’s still around? Effectively, Florida genetics was gone, so they didn’t make it, and they were better than, just around 90% of all mottled ducks that we sampled then. And again, the same exact number that we sampled in the South Carolina study, they were all just pure, still pure western Gulf coast mottled ducks. But obviously that might have some influence on birds in Florida if they’re starting to push down.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about scale. What next in the world of Duck DNA and how do listeners sign up?

Mike Brazier: Well, this is year 2 and application period is open. We are, yeah. As I kind of mentioned at the beginning, we’re going to try to sign up somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 participants. And longer term, well, go to duckdna.com. there’s a little button there, several places, apply today. Yeah. And enter your information, you’re not going to get spammed with anything of that nature. Yeah, I guess you have to enter your email because we have to notify you, but you’re not going to get spammed with anything, this is just need that to communicate with you. So the way this works, you go, you apply your name goes into a database and we do a random selection on those every other week or so beginning in September. It does not matter when you registered, if you registered the day before the drawing, your chance of being drawn is just as likely as the person that registered the day that we opened the application period. Then we will send out a – we’ll send out an email. Everyone that has been selected, you will be instructed to go sort of create your account on the DuckDNA website. There’s a portal that you can go to. You can log in if you’ve been selected, you kind of added in some back end database, giving you permission to create an account, that’s where you send us your address. You enter your address and maybe another piece of information, then we send you a kit, it gets mailed out. Actually, Phil and his team mail it out. We’re doing a redesign of the box right now. We’ve done some additional tweaks to the application, the online app. We’ve done a few extra other tweaks to other parts of the system, so we’re trying to refine a few things, make it a bit smoother, but then you get the kit mailed out to you and then, the instructions are in it. And longer term, back to your other question. I think it depends on our ability to continue to attract funding to make this possible, whether that be through the contribution of additional major philanthropic donors or whether it be grants through research, foundation grants or anything of that nature. But right now, despite having a number of people say they are willing to pay to participate in this, we’re not going down that road. We will consider it next year, not doing that this year for a number of reasons, but long term, I think we’re all kind of just gazing into the future and we don’t know exactly what it looks like.

Jared Henson: And just to throw this out there, and I know this as someone who’s done bench work in the past, science is not cheap. So this has been an awesome opportunity through the donors that have contributed to this. Phil, what’s it cost to run a sample, roughly in lab cost?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, we got it down to $50.

Jared Henson: Yeah, I mean, that’s a sample.

Mike Brazier: So when we’re sending out 3 vials, it’s probably $160, $170, something like that.

Jared Henson: Plus, shipping and all of that. So, I wanted to point that out that this is not cheap. This requires a significant amount of money from donors and people that want to contribute, and we’re very thankful that they are doing that.

Mike Brazier: If there’s anybody listening to this that is thinking about contributing to Ducks Unlimited and you want to make a contribution to DuckDNA, you can email us @duckdna@ducks.org and we can put you in touch with the right people to have that discussion.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Wow. Thank you all very much. Dr. Phil Lavretsky, University of Texas, El Paso. Dr. Mike Brazier, Jared Henson from Ducks Unlimited. Any closing remarks?

Mike Brazier: I guess I would just like to say thank you to everybody involved in this, everybody within the organization, all of our partners across North America, and most definitely every hunter that has shown an interest in this. It’s been phenomenal, phenomenal response. I will throw a big thank you to our producer over here, Chris Isaac, who is doing all the audio video on this, helping set this up, of course, internally here. Thanks to Jared, Dr. Jared Henson on our side as well. Ramsey, thanks to you. I mean, this is kind of like thank you all around on this co-branded episode. So it’s been great. And thanks to Phil.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it very much, I learned a lot. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where you too can become a citizen scientist with the Duck DNA program, that ain’t cheap. Can you imagine that $50 a pop on this deal? Link below to sign up, the sign up period is right now. We do need your participation and as always, a reminder to support Ducks Unlimited. See you next time.

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