Cutting Edge of North American Waterfowl Science & Management

Yeah, so basically what we’re doing is sort of a brainchild of Mike and I and my hopes and dreams over the last 10 years. 

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Great opportunity today. Listen, opportunity’s knocking. You all have heard today’s guest before on future episodes, Dr. Phil Lavretsky. Ducks Unlimited waterfowl biologist Dr. Brasher, Michael Brasher, here to talk about an exciting program called duckDNA, how you too can participate in the cutting edge of science and management of North American waterfowl species. Guys, how are you?

Phil Lavretsky: Doing great. Happy to be here. Excited to talk about it.

Michael Brasher: Yes. Great to be with you, Ramsey. Thanks for doing this.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. All right, guys, tell me what we’re talking about. What is duckDNA? Let’s introduce the program to the listeners. What are we talking about here? Now, Phil, you’ve been on here several times talking about a lot of the matter, genetics. You and I have worked together down in Africa. We’re going to Australia. But, man, this hits close to home. Now, we’re talking about my ducks right here on the North American continent. What does this program entail?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, so basically what we’re doing is sort of a brainchild of Mike and I and my hopes and dreams over the last 10 years. And that is to get the hunters of North America, as a conglomerate of scientists, moving waterfowl conservation forward. We’re going to be able to essentially do the kinds of studies at scale that have never been done before and no other organism in this world probably has the capacity to do so, by enlisting and getting the hunters to contribute samples that they get information about. But then that comes into a larger fold of understanding the topics that we talked about. Hybridization rates, we can look at the largest geographical scale, time and spatial scales, that across the season looking at where is hybridization occurring. Why are more pintail mallard hybrids over there? Why are game farm mallard hybrids over here? Start to build this data set that will then open up venues and questions regarding, are there certain habitats associated with certain species at different times of the year and how? Then that information can be boiled down and provided to folks at DU and others that will say, okay, well, we need to focus on these areas or not. The things that we’re going to be able to answer are, why are certain species migrating certain areas at certain times? Are there genetic components to that? How can we better manage for that? Those are the kinds of questions we’re going to start to answer with this program called duckDNA that is at scales that I could never imagine, hopefully.

Ramsey Russell: How does Ducks Unlimited fit into it, Michael?

Connecting Waterfowl Hunters

And it’s a true collaboration, we’re bringing the science, we’re bringing some of the logistics and some of the branding to it and also the connection to the waterfowl hunters of the US. It’s an exciting thing.

Michael Brasher: Yeah, Ramsey. This is super exciting for us to be part of. Like you, we have had the fortune of visiting with Dr. Lavretsky on our podcast over the past 2 or 3 years. And one of our recent episodes, we spoke with Phil and Dr. Brian Davis. I know you’re very familiar with, Brian, about some of the work they’re doing doing in this space and really, this is one of the true moments of discovery in modern day waterfowl science. We’ve studied waterfowl for decades, over a century practically and we know a lot about the ecology of these birds. There are very few true unknown discoveries that we come up with these days. But whenever Phil started uncovering some of these real key genetic issues to game farm mallard hybridization being sort of at the top of that list, it really just – I don’t know, began to open our eyes and say, this is, number one, it’s super cool to learn about these things that we previously didn’t know about. But then also, there are potential management implications to this in learning about what’s going on across the landscape. And just the field of genetics is exploding at a clip that I can’t even really fathom. There’s so many unanswered questions and Ducks Unlimited wants to be part of something that is helping to answer so many interesting questions. Although we don’t know exactly right now what management implications are. But you will not ever know if you don’t ask the question and invest in the science that provides you with the data to get those answers. So we’re kind of bringing some of the logistics to this. Phil is the scientist, the geneticist. He’s going to be doing all the analysis of the issues. We are leveraging our communication staff, our web team, our IT staff to make this a user friendly, engaging experience. And it’s a true collaboration, we’re bringing the science, we’re bringing some of the logistics and some of the branding to it and also the connection to the waterfowl hunters of the US. It’s an exciting thing.

Ramsey Russell: How specifically will American duck hunters be able to participate in duckDNA?

Michael Brasher: Yeah, so the way this is set up, Ramsey, we have a website, duckdna.com. Folks, when they hear this episode, they can go to that website and check it out. One thing I will say is that we will be adding more content as we go through this. We’ve been working on this for months already. But it’s in the grand scheme of things, it’s a real rapid pace, we’re trying to get this rolled out. So there’s still some work to do. But they can go to duckdna.com and they will read a little bit about the project. There is an apply today or apply now button that they can click. When they do that, they’ll be asked to submit their name and email information and then their name goes into a list of potential participants. I say potential because just by applying does not mean that you are guaranteed a spot. We have a total of 1500 samples that we’re going to be collecting this year, asking hunters to collect and submit, and those are going to go out in allotments of 5. So if you do the math, that means a maximum of 300 participants this year. And a lot of that is just – we don’t know what the demand is going to be, what the interest is going to be. We don’t know how the logistics are going to work out, so we’re considering this sort of a pilot year. So folks can go to that website apply, their name will be entered into that list. And around mid October we’re going to do an initial drawing of about 150 participants. We’ll notify them by way of email. If they were selected, they’ll give us some information. They’ll sign up for an account. We will send them a kit. It’s a little box. It’ll contain 5 vials with some buffer solution in it, some instructions. It’s going to even have a little sticker with a duckDNA logo with DU and UTEP as equal partners in this. And then we’ll continue to have people apply. And then in early December, we’re going to draw for the second group of participants whatever is remaining should be about 150 remaining at that point, participants. And so that’s going to help us sort of spread out the sample and space and time. So that’s kind of it in a nutshell. It will be free this year. There’s no charge to the hunter to participate. There’s going to be return shipping, return postage included. We’re trying to cover all our bases here, Ramsey, to make this as user friendly, as fun and yet as scientifically informative as possible. And we’re just super excited to be part of this with Phil.

Ramsey Russell: Phil, what do you think about all that? Is 1500 a good start?

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, it’s an excellent start. If we go out and all 1500 are gone, that tells us something. If we trickle out 1500, that also tells us something. Hopefully we don’t have any vials left over. But my experience, folks contact me on just general basis, like, hey, I shot this weird looking duck, can you help me out, figure it out? And so far, I’ve been sort of pro bono kind of like sprinkling them across all the different studies, but that takes time until I get the money, until there’s a study where I could add them in. So there’s a time component. Right now we’re looking to get this thing. You get us a sample and you get a certificate telling you, congratulations little Billy or little Susie or yourself shot 50% mallard, 50% pintail. You get to start talking to your friends about it, tell you instead of all of us going on a social media and be like, oh, it’s this thing or that thing. You could be with certainty telling everybody, no, it’s actually just a farm duck.

Ramsey Russell: But like for those that have shot a bandit duck, the duck was shot in, I don’t know, Texas and it came from Saskatchewan or Alaska. I mean, what more might you find out about that duck? Will you find out where its origins were, like, where it came from or even further back? What you see I’m saying, what more do you find out?

Advancing Conservation Efforts Through Genetic Research

And if that’s the case, then we’ll be able to start looking at origin reasons, genetic reasons, potentially that some species like to migrate at certain times or use certain landscapes.

Phil Lavretsky: So for certain species, we just have just enough reference samples that we’re going to be able to tell you, oh, well, this is a pintail or this is a green winged teal or cinnamon teal or maybe a cross between something of that sort. But that’s the beauty of this project. As we build this data set, just like with the human genome projects with the 23 and me in ancestry.com, the reason they can answer so many questions is they’re working with hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million human genomes and the genetics of all these individuals. I believe that we’ll be able to start getting to the point where we’ll have the data to start potentially looking at fine scale structure across landscapes. And if that’s the case, then we’ll be able to start looking at origin reasons, genetic reasons, potentially that some species like to migrate at certain times or use certain landscapes. And I think those are the types of answers that we’ll be able to start folding into more direct conservation or management implications.

Ramsey Russell: Mike, you talk about applying. I can understand, you don’t want to just turn it out ad libitum at a free cost. It could be millions of people participate, and you’re going to have – You’re going to select from the people that apply. What are some of the criteria you’re looking for? Are you looking for different focus areas? What exactly are you all looking for in this initial 1500 or so people?

Michael Brasher: Yeah, that’s a great question, Ramsey. And I didn’t even – I know the guy even gave you a hint that this is one of the things that we were going to be asking about. But it’s very relevant to that question. Whenever you apply, I said previously you’re going to be asked for your name and email. What I forgot to mention is that you’re also going to be asked to indicate in which state you do most of your duck hunting. There’s a couple of things. What I need to sort of clarify. This year we’re only accepting tissue samples from ducks. So that’s where our focus is. I also mentioned earlier that we’re only going to be selecting from US hunters. That’s just because of a postage issue, because we’ve got the prepaid postage included with each of these kits to return the samples to Phil. We don’t know what postage is going to be from different parts of Canada, so we couldn’t cover that this year. So that’s why it’s only US hunters this year. But whenever they indicate their area where they primarily hunt, that’s going to be a potentially useful piece of information. If we only get 350, 400 people sign up, it’s not that big of a deal. But if we get 1500, 2500 people apply to be part of this, then we’re going to look at that state in which they primarily hunt as somewhat of a stratification factor. Not necessarily. I mean, all states will be – participation from all states will be eligible, but we would just use that state kind of indicator as a way to spread these samples out geographically. That’s the only criterion Ramsey is and it’s really not even an criteria. The only criterion is that you are a waterfowl hunter, a duck hunter, to be honest and that you would be mailing these samples back from within the US. Whenever you submit the samples, whenever you collect the samples, you’ll be asked some additional information about it in terms of like where you harvested it? When you harvested? What kind of habitat it was in? The number of questions we’re asking in that regard are pretty small right now. Depending on what happens in the future, that list of questions may be larger. I think we’ve gonna – In terms of where people harvested the bird, we don’t need people to be highly specific. If they wanna provide us a specific location, that’s fine. But I think there’s gonna be some language in there to allow people to sort of obscure the location, the preciseness of the location as you might. As a waterfowl hunter, you can understand, appreciate that, right?

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Michael Brasher: Not for their hunting hole.

Ramsey Russell: At least for the pilot year, is there, are there any species you all really want to get or will the people that, will the participants be able to submit genetics for mini duck they shot?

Michael Brasher: Well, so I’ll take a stab. Let me take a stab at that first, Phil. What we are saying on the website and all the material that people will be receiving is that we’re focusing on mallards, black ducks, mottled ducks and Mexican ducks and hybrids. And that’s to try to focus that limited number of samples on the species around which some of these questions are most pressing. Now, there is going to be this issue of, in the future, can we accept any number of species or any species? And I kind of have to leave that to Phil, but at least kind of where we’ve agreed right now is that focusing on those 4 mallard like ducks and hybrids.

Ramsey Russell: What about it, Phil?

Wild Waterfowl vs Farm Waterfowl

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, I was just going to add that mallards are the most pressing, particularly to try to get ahead of this game farm wild mallard situation in North America and scale up in that. But as Mike suggested, the best datasets I have for comparative purposes to really get fine tuned analysis of, hey, this thing’s a black duck, but it’s 90% black duck, 10% mallard or whatever it might be, would be black ducks, mottled ducks and Mexican ducks. That being said, the reason we even got to this point is I now have or my lab has, through all the different studies, enough samples of every North American waterfowl species, duck species, we soon should have all the geese as well, that we could actually do those comparatives of, hey, this thing, I think, is a Goldeneye, Hooded Merganser. In fact, we’ve had one of those. Hybrids we could tell you that, we can find some sea duck hybrids, Anas duck, dabbling duck hybrids. Whatever it might be, we could answer that question now. And that’s because we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve got nice sampling of all these different species. Of course, as people – if you just shot your first green winged teal and you want to be like, hey, give me the genetics of this green winged teal, we’ll do that, too. And you could put that up with your first duck up on the wall on the mount. I think that’s a great nice little piece of history and knowledge of that first duck or whatever it might be. But again, any kind of hybrid, anything of interest, we can do and we’re excited to do it.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic.

Phil Lavretsky: I was also going to say the way people are going to be sampling it is we’ve tested this now, but essentially all we need is a piece of tongue.

Ramsey Russell: A piece of tongue. I was just fixing to ask you what all I had to cut out. This sounds easy. A piece of tongue.

Phil Lavretsky: Piece of tongue. Yeah, we’ve done. Yeah. So, Ramsey, I had you cutting into the breast tissue, pulling it out, making sure we don’t contaminate things. But now I’ve done enough kind of comparisons of – do we get good DNA off of it? Are the analyses good? I was really scared of the tongue because I thought we were going to get a whole bunch of sequences of the food that they eat, because there’s food DNA in there as well, the seeds and the inverts and everything else that they eat. But, in fact, we do it does a really good job of sequencing the duck and we get really nice, clean sequences of the ancestry. So that way, you shoot a duck, you don’t have to be like, oh, I need to send this thing to the taxidermist and they’ll take out the piece, you just open that mouth, clip off using a big toe clipper, maybe or some scissors or your knife right there. You clip it off, you put it into the buffer, shake up the buffer and then wait until you finish out all your 5. Or if you want to send that one, you can send that one as well. And then we’ll take over from there. Of course, we’ll give you some wipes in case you got 5 birds out there. And between the clips, you want to clean off your knife or your clippers or your scissors with some ethanol wipes or something like that. So that way we don’t cross contaminate that way. But so far, Mike and I tried this out recently and this past year and then I just did this on some birds from Arizona. At comparing the tissue, your breast tissue versus tongue tissue worked out great. So I’m pretty confident that at least 99% of all the tissues that come here should work. Of course, I’m sure some might not, but hopefully, that’ll be a limited amount.

Michael Brasher: Ramsey, one thing I’ll add to that is, I would encourage folks to try to collect tissue samples from 5 ducks of the ducks that we’re targeting before they’re sending that back in. Now and so the way that would – you think about this and these would all be in the instructions that people receive. Let’s say you go hunting opening weekend, you kill one mallard, you want to collect that tongue, the piece of the tongue tissue, put it in the buffer solution. Then the instructions tell you you can store that in the freezer until you’re ready to ship it so let’s say you’re not going to go hunting again for 3 weeks or a month and a half. That doesn’t mean that you have to then, all of a sudden submit that sample, put the one sample you collected in the freezer, wait till you go hunting later in the season and then collected an additional 4 samples and then returned. Basically, just trying to make the most use out of the funding that we’re investing in this from the postage and all the sampling kit and all that kind of stuff. So that’d be my advice, my suggestion. Let’s try to get all those things filled.

How to Be a Part of DuckDNA

Ramsey Russell: This is fantastic. When will this program – we can go right now. Oh, I had one more question, but we can go right now and apply at duckDNA to participate in this exciting program. When will the samples actually go out and why – That was the second question I was going to ask. Why did you all break it up into 2 draw sets? Why now and why earlier? And why December? Are you all looking for something different in that timeframe?

Michael Brasher: Yeah. So I’ll take the first stab at that, Phil. So it is duckdna.com I also will tell people there is a duckdna.org out there that’s not associated with this. That’s actually a good friend of Phil’s. That’s a website that belongs to a geneticist down at University of Miami. But ours is duckdna.com. You’ll know it when you get there. It says it has all this relevant information and we are – Let’s see, what was your question there, Ramsey? Why did you –

Ramsey Russell: Why is it 2 draw periods, like early and late? Is that going to be like Northern latitudes and Southern latitudes or east and west? Why an earlier draw period and a later draw period? What are you all looking for and why was it designed like that?

Michael Brasher: I think that’s right, Ramsey, is it’s mostly to ensure that we get good temporal representation, across the hunting season. We want to make sure that hunters in Northern latitudes have an opportunity early or ideally, we would already have this stuff out there. We’re running a little bit behind, it’s to be expected anytime you’re trying to ramp up something like this. We’re about a week and a half or so behind, but that’s okay. When they hear this episode, they can go to duckdna.com and apply and all that kind of stuff. And then mid October is designed to still capture some of those Northern latitude states. And then in December, that’s designed to capture some of those more southern hunters, Southern latitudes. And so I guess that’s probably another thing you haven’t really thought of, Ramsey. And this just sort of indicates where we are and our thinking on this, we’re going to be learning as we go, is when that first set of names gets drawn, we probably would favor some of those individuals at those more Northern states because we waited until December to do that. So, yeah, that’s a good thing. Glad you asked that question. So we’ll probably incorporate that.

Phil Lavretsky: As you were saying that I was going to make note that all hunters who don’t get drawn the first for the first set, don’t be discouraged. You’ll be put into the second drawing. It’s like a western big game draw, but you get 2 chances at it.

Michael Brasher: That’s right.

Waterfowl Samples from North America

I mean, if we were doing somewhere between 5 and 10,000 that would be just incredible. 

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. All right. So this year we’re going to start small – You want 1500 samples across the North American landscape. How many would you like to collect? What would be too many? Is there such thing as too many field? I mean, now we start to get into like, that ancestry.com type stuff. I mean, is that where this program is going, eventually?

Phil Lavretsky: I sure hope so. I sure hope my program –

Ramsey Russell: How many would be too many?

Phil Lavretsky: That’s all about scaling –

Ramsey Russell: I mean, if that’s all you like to see this thing built up to one day.

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, if we were doing somewhere between 5 and 10,000 that would be just incredible. I’d have to really look at how to scale this up. I’ve got good ideas and now I know how to do it. Be some serious asks from the university. But it’s all, I mean, it’s definitely all possible. We’ve essentially scaled the process all people pipetting instead of machines or anything like that. And we can still do the entire process in 3 days and then 2 days for sequencing and a couple days for analysis. And you’re looking at a week, essentially, best case scenario, 2 weeks for sure. You should start seeing your certificates coming out, of course, this year, as Mike suggested, I’m sure there’s going to be lots of hiccups, so give us 2 to 4 weeks to get you that certificate. But yeah, I would love to see – if the participation is there and hunters are excited about it. And we’ve got this program going on. I mean, I’d love to see everybody having an opportunity to send their favorite duck in.

Ramsey Russell: I think the opportunity is going to be there. I’ve got a lot of faith in American duck hunters as citizen scientists via the bands, the collars, the reporting rates, the conversations you see in and social media. The wing bees, man, what a great way to get your hands on ducks and give back and contribute. I think people are going to be all over this thing. Why wouldn’t you be, why wouldn’t you want to know where your ducks are coming from and be able to take these samples and give back to the scientific community. I think it’s incredible.

Michael Brasher: Yeah, Ramsey, I agree. I think it is a natural progression in the role that hunters play in waterfowl science and waterfowl management. You mentioned band recoveries reporting bands, you mentioned the harvest surveys. This is the next step in what our participation as hunters looks like and it can even go farther. One of the things we haven’t even talked about yet, Phil, is that we’re going to be asking people optionally to take photos of these birds. And then that’s going to go into some additional kind of like artificial intelligence work that Phil and his lab are doing to identify some of these hybrid individuals. And maybe if we get crazy and think about this, maybe even identify, look at the wing and identify age and sex of those harvested birds remotely just through photos and artificial intelligence machine learning sometime in the future. And that information could feed into such new developments. We don’t know that yet. Phil can probably talk about that a bit more if he wants to. But, yeah, it’s just a natural progression in the way we’re that the role that hunters can play in sustaining this incredible resource and helping us learn more about it.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. I love that you got into that. Just an update because we broke that like beta, beta, beta version with Ramsey there. We’ve rebuilt the entire brand and we’re at over 90% accuracy between mottled ducks, Mexican ducks and mallards. We’re building in on structural, the way it should see structure, so bills compared to wings compared to the legs, it tells you how to take those kinds of pictures. And once we have that, we’ll be able to actually have a pretty good ability to even tell apart a feral game farm from wild bird and early hybrid, early generation hybrids that I think can transform the way we might be able to manage these things where not only hunters are going to be able to say for sure or with some certainty this thing’s a hybrid or this thing is a true wild mallard just with these photos, but also that, there’s management implications to it. Just like we talked about that in the podcast in the past. Yeah, I didn’t think we were going to talk about it, but I’m excited. I hope individuals that do sign up and get this opportunity do provide some of those photos that we’re going to be needing to basically educate our AI of what is a hybrid and what is not. Our AI is completely different than others. Other things like Merlin or other sorts of apps, because ours are built on photos that are genetically vetted so we have certainty to what we’re actually looking at. That’s a big difference.

Ramsey Russell: Any closing points, either one of you?

Michael Brasher: Yeah, Ramsey, I guess a couple of things, thanks to our sponsors that are helping make this possible, they’re helping make this free of charge to participating hunters, Marc and Sherrie Pierce out of Montana or some donors that are helping us out. We’re collecting names and donations from others as well. We don’t have all their names right now, but they’ll eventually appear on the website. Thank you to those folks. Thank you to the Ducks Unlimited southern region for their contributions to this. I also have to say a big shout out to the people here in Ducks Unlimited that are making this possible. Our web team, our IT team, our communication staff and a huge thank you to Ashley Tunstall, who is our conservation science assistant who is the lead on this project for us. Also, thanks to Kai Victor, he’s another one of our conservation science assistants that is helping us out with this. We wouldn’t be able to do this without them. And so thank you to everyone involved. Thank you, Phil. And Phil, any final comments from you.

Phil Lavretsky: No. Just apply now and tell all your buddies to apply and all your girlfriends to apply and everybody else that wants to apply, get your name in the hat, as one would say at a DU banquet. And I hope to have a bang year, banger year to get this thing off the ground. I mean, this is a dream of mine for a long time and just to see this so close to coming to fruition is a little mind boggling and out of this world for me. But yeah, apply now. This is a perfect chance not only to be hunter conservationists, but hunter scientists. And I think that’s where I hope others out there are just as excited as I am about it.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, how cool is that to be a citizen scientist, to get to participate in the cutting edge, a moment of discovery in waterfowl science, as Dr. Brasher put it so eloquently. duckdna.com go apply, participate. The link is down in the pod, the episode description. Thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere, we’ll see you next time.