Latest / Ducks Unlimited Podcast / Unlocking Nature's Mysteries with duckDNA (Ep. 724)

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Unlocking Nature's Mysteries with duckDNA (Ep. 724) · Ducks Unlimited Podcast

• 0:03
  Kayci Messerly: Hey, everybody. Join us today as we sit down with doctor Phil Lebretsky at the University of Texas, El Paso to learn more about the genetic insights coming out of Duck DNA. Stay tuned.
• 0:24
  VO: Can we do a mic check, please?
• 0:25
  Everybody, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast.
• 0:27
  I'm your host, doctor Mike Brasher. I'm your host, Katie Burke. I'm your host, doctor Jerad Henson. And I'm your host, Matt Harrison.
• 0:41
  Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, the only podcast about all things waterfowl. From hunting insights to science based discussions about ducks, geese, and issues affecting waterfowl and wetlands conservation in North America. The DU podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails.
• 1:08
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• 1:29
  Kayci Messerly: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. We're bringing it to you from the University of Texas, El Paso. I am your special host for this episode, Casey Messerly, and I've got my conservation science assistant coworker, Katie Tucker.
• 1:45
  Katie Tucker: Yes. I'm here. Katie's here
• 1:47
  Kayci Messerly: with us, and we are visiting with doctor Phil Labretsky here at UTEP.
• 1:51
  Phil Lavretsky: Welcome everybody to El Paso. We've been having a great time here chasing some birds, learning about genetics.
• 1:58
  Kayci Messerly: Yes. And so today we want to talk to you about Duck DNA and the genetic insights that we've learned over the past few years and the things that we're hoping to uncover going forward. And so our one of our favorite Duck DNA guests, doctor Phil, will have a lot to tell us and we'll go from there. One of the main questions we hear a lot is when you guys have sent in your samples, you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at the lab. Right?
• 2:24
  And we can now tell you a little more about that because we have the expert himself, doctor Phil.
• 2:31
  Phil Lavretsky: And I mean, actually, you guys are not experts. You got to see the whole, process. You got to see the place, the area, the people. You got to talk to everybody. Unfortunately, Virgie wasn't able to make it here to speak for her own, sake, but the samples come in, and, Virgie and Victoria are the two key people here that, log your samples.
• 2:54
  They start the process with DNA extraction, check it on a gel, make sure that it's all kosher. It goes into PCR amplification, and then in addition to genome sequencing. And that data would then get sent out. So that that you're looking at a one week process. It gets sent out to a a company that we work with, that we have good relationships with, and they know that this stuff is coming.
• 3:24
  They'll process it as fast as possible, but sometimes it's not fast enough. So you're looking at another two weeks there one to two weeks. Sometimes it's the it's three days later, but oftentimes, it's about two weeks later. That data gets in. I take over.
• 3:41
  I do my magic. I figure out what these birds are underneath the hood, and at that point, I put that together, it goes back to all of you, and those certificates then start getting sent out.
• 3:54
  Kayci Messerly: Yeah. I think there's a lot of communication that our duck hunters have with us, but a lot of times, they don't get to see the people behind the scenes. We've had a great time this week getting to see all the work that you guys are doing and exactly all the steps. I know there were a lot of words you threw around for a bunch of the different processes. We won't necessarily go into all of those steps today, but we'll talk a little bit about those genetic insights and inquiries that we have based on that data that we have.
• 4:21
  As hunters, I think the thing that we notice first, right, in a lot of these birds is the visual aspect. Our hybrid participants, that's what we ask them to submit photos of these birds. Right? Your lab is doing a little bit of work there with the visual characteristics for a But lot of these birds as as geneticists, we look past just the physical visual characteristics, and we look a little deeper. I think there's a catchphrase you had working out a little bit going on this week.
• 4:49
  Phil Lavretsky: Actually, I have to actually look it up, because I really liked it. So I wrote it down, and it says nature provides mysteries and we unlock them. Put that on a t shirt. So for eons, we could only see the outside, and we could see what things look like. Right?
• 5:04
  You look at something, you're like, that's a lion, that's a snake, that's something else. And oftentimes, we're always saying, well, those two snakes look the same. That one's poisonous. That one must be poisonous. And then later on, you're like, oh, that one's not poisonous.
• 5:16
  So what's up with that? And the same thing goes for a duck. You could look at the duck and you could say, yeah. I think these are the traits that explain the hybrids or this duck or that duck. Oftentimes, they come with biases, things that we always think that might be the case.
• 5:32
  And what we do is take away the necessity of that quote unquote expert and let the genetics tell the story. As I always say, genetics doesn't lie. That's the only thing that doesn't lie. And so once you actually know what you're working with, then the follow-up questions can be less and less biased, and you can really formulate what those traits are that can explain those species or organisms or hybrids or anything of that nature.
• 5:58
  Kayci Messerly: Yeah, and we often talk with Doctor. Mike, and he's always saying science is a process, right? And so work and do research based on the best information that we have available to us at the time, and over the past few decades even, the amount of material and genetic work that's been able to be done has just improved so much based on our access to these resources as well. So we had a little bit of a conversation earlier about visually ID ing birds, for example, like in the winged bee, and how we've been able to kind of look at that moving forward as
• 6:31
  Phil Lavretsky: well. Yeah. Yeah. That that was the spur of so much of the stuff that we're doing now. In twenty in twenty ten, I went to a bunch of flyaway wingbees.
• 6:41
  If the I'm sure the folks listening to this probably know this, but they don't if they don't, a random set of waterfowl hunters are chosen by US Fish and Wildlife to submit wings that go to locations for each one of the four flyways. And then at the end of the hunting season at some point in February or so, around then, a bunch of biologists get to those flyway locations. They start opening this Manila envelope with a bunch of wings, and they start identifying everything to species and sex and age. And that's important because that gives us the information about how those populations are doing. They're giving us sex ratios if there's some sort of thing that's happening.
• 7:26
  For example, if the population did not have a good output, so, you know, poor nesting, then what you would expect is an overabundance of adults. If they had really good nesting that previous summer, then you would see a more abundance of hatch year or first year birds. And that tells us things, and then that goes into some fancy models that that dictate what happens the following year. But the point is that that also gave me an opportunity to go to a single location and get a bunch of wings and a bunch of genetic material all at once. And at that time, I was I was more interested about black ducks and mallards and model ducks.
• 8:08
  Well, I'm still interested in that, but we needed that genetic material at that time. So I went there. I let everybody call things that are hybrids and, you know, black deck mallard hybrids. And, of course, it's all based on that little white wing the presence or absence of that white wing bar. And I said, great.
• 8:24
  I took that. And then we did the genetics, and we found that all of that was only 60% accurate in confirming hybrid. So essentially a coin toss, and we published this in 2019 showcasing that. And that even the Mallards and the Black Ducks were only 80% accurate with 20% of those that were either identified as a high as a Black Duck or a Mallard were actually hybrids. And so we're obviously keying on the wrong traits.
• 8:51
  Right? Traits that we thought were indicative of a hybrid are really naturally occurring, but they're occurring at different rates in these populations or these species. And the same thing once we use genetics to tell us what an individual was. Florida model ducks, Western Gulf Coast model ducks, and Mexican ducks all can show showcase that white a bit of that white wing bar. It's just at a much smaller proportion, and it's due to their ancestry from the Mallard, the more very recent and the retention of those traits rather than hybridization.
• 9:26
  But the more important thing is that once we figure out what hybrids really are, we can then take over and say, okay. What are the traits, the physical traits that explain these these differences rather than say, these traits appear to be different, so let's just use that. So it's a bit different approach. But at that time, they didn't have genetics, so, like, they went with the best option. And and one story, when they built out that field key for black ducks, they based it off a study where they paired black ducks together, and they would do these breeding events where they would pick an individual that looked a female that was just super black ducky and a male that was super black ducky, and they'd mate them, and they'd be like, alright.
• 10:13
  All the offspring should be black ducky. But every single time, some proportion, especially among the males, were always had some green in the head or or a curly tail or black in the rump and and white wing bar. And they would do this three different times where they would pick the most black ducky looking bird, and some proportion of their offspring were always that. And that at that time, they threw their hands up and said, they must all be hybrids and just put them out back on the landscape. But what they were really looking at is the fact that it's part of their ancestry.
• 10:47
  You're not gonna get get away from that. That's why they're always there. Now we have more data on these black ducks and the same thing for model ducks and Mexican ducks where first year males will showcase those traits, those mallard like traits. And if they survive into their second year and their third year, they don't. They don't have them.
• 11:06
  They don't produce them. So it's sort of like they're, as I described, they're a preteen that can't control their hormones. And so they're expressing weird stuff. And then they become an adult and at least pretend to look like a good duck.
• 11:22
  Katie Tucker: Is there a way for a hunter to tell, like with a bird in the hand, if it's a young Mexican duck or model duck that's exhibiting mallard like traits rather than a hybrid?
• 11:30
  Phil Lavretsky: There is. But you'd have to know how to age birds. Right? So you have to look at the wing and and look at those covert those primary and secondary coverts and look at the shape of them. You have to look for in the wing or in the tail, those notch tail feathers that would tell you quite quite quickly
• 11:49
  Katie Tucker: That it's a young bird. Right?
• 11:50
  Phil Lavretsky: That it's a young bird. Exactly. And so it takes a it takes it takes effort and knowledge of what you're looking at. And and I will even tell you that when we were scientifically collecting in Chihuahua, Mexico, and I was like, sweet. Look at all these hybrids I'm shooting that we're collecting there.
• 12:09
  None of them turned out to be hybrids. And it was only after we figured out that they weren't hybrids that we started looking, and what we found what we figured out is every single bird that looked like a hybrid was actually a formative or first year male. Right? At that time, I just wasn't looking so closely, but every single one of them. And then every single adult never showed it.
• 12:30
  So that plumage retention is a real thing, and it does make life difficult. But my previous PhD student, Flora Hernandez, did create a field key for Mexican ducks for every age sex cohort to distinguish a Mexican duck from a mallard or a hybrid with 98% confidence. So we know we can do it. We can see it. It does take effort right now.
• 12:53
  However, hopefully, we can start throwing these things into a an application for hunters to start using to make life a bit easier.
• 13:03
  Kayci Messerly: Yeah, and I think that's one of the beauties right now, right, of Duck DNA is that if you're out in the field and there's something that you see that you don't understand or that you are unsure about, there's now this outlet and opportunity to get more information. And like you said, it's not just based on what we visually are seeing, because sometimes these things are quite tricky, and some of the most trained individuals out there still struggle with some of that differentiation.
• 13:30
  Phil Lavretsky: Absolutely.
• 13:31
  Kayci Messerly: Yeah. And so now we have Duck DNA, and so there's some more common things that we see on our end, on the application end. We see a lot of these leucistic individuals. Can you tell us a little bit more about what's going on underneath the hood there?
• 13:44
  Phil Lavretsky: I mean, to the extent that we know. So we know that ducks can be white. Wild birds can be white. They can showcase plumages that shouldn't be there because most likely is that they're naturally they are the they're a true unicorn. Unlike a domestic bird or a game farm bird or something of of domestic or captive bred heritage where we can force the that that trait to be expressed at a higher rate than naturally occurring, some birds can showcase that.
• 14:19
  And what we're finding in particular is that there's there's a few genes responsible that we know of. And in particular, they're found on sex chromosomes, this z w chromosome system where males are z z, so they're homozygous, Females are ZW, hetero they're hetergametic, not homozygous. Homogametic, same chromosomes. Hetergametic, different chromosomes. So they're the reverse of humans or mammals.
• 14:48
  Kayci Messerly: And so just for our audience who might be more more familiar with the human group, you know, because that is what we are, when we're looking at it from the human perspective, we don't think of it in ZWs. We think of it in
• 15:00
  Phil Lavretsky: XX and XY. Same system same system evolved in a completely different way.
• 15:07
  Kayci Messerly: And so our males are that XY and humans Yeah. And our females are the XX. But once again, just for reiteration,
• 15:13
  Katie Tucker: for birds
• 15:14
  Phil Lavretsky: ducks, it's the reverse. And so what we are seeing is an increase of those blonde mallards in particular. Those are birds in example, that one black duck was was a blonde, and they're almost all hens, I believe.
• 15:29
  Katie Tucker: And there's been one drake
• 15:31
  Phil Lavretsky: One scap. One So it takes so the the reasoning behind this is that we know that several of these genes are on the z chromosome. So a female with a knockout for her plumage type will be blonde or or or even white, depending on what happens, with just one knockout. A male requires both of them to be knocked out.
• 15:57
  Kayci Messerly: And when you say a knockout in this regard
• 15:59
  Phil Lavretsky: Meaning a mutation that results in a nonfunctional gene that results in nonfunctional plumage characteristics.
• 16:07
  Kayci Messerly: So our audience will probably, based on the way we kind of say it, right, that leucistic trait where we have that lack of melanin being produced.
• 16:16
  Phil Lavretsky: Exactly. It's a lack of the incapability? Yeah, that's it. Incapability to to layer on color, black, gray, red, oranges. These are the types of colors that can be created internally.
• 16:32
  And so if you make that gene nonfunctional, there's no matter what diet you have or what you should look like, you can't look like.
• 16:41
  Katie Tucker: And to be fair, I have now recalled also, I believe we had a Drake pintail that was leucistic. Yeah. And and full credit to the hunter of that pintail. I don't want him to think, oh, she just forgot. But So we see these blonde birds that are all lighter colored.
• 16:55
  But we also see White. The famous blue wing teal Yes. Patches of white. What's up with that?
• 17:02
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So that's there's two things there. Old birds will also do that. So where they're they're in particular, we know that this happens in a Hawaiian duck and Laysan duck because they can live, know, into their ninth or tenth year. And those older birds have struggled to probably hormonally activate their genes accurate appropriately.
• 17:27
  Right? Where they're layering on the correct amount of it's sort of like graying hair. That's how I I just thought of that. It's sort of like graying hair. At some point, you just you just can't produce the right coloration anymore, and you gotta, you know, buy that product if you wanna do that.
• 17:45
  Yeah. So so that pintail, if we could age it somehow, my hypothesis would be that it's probably old. Right?
• 17:51
  Katie Tucker: That's so funny.
• 17:52
  Phil Lavretsky: So you get these these patching situation. Things that are completely blonde or completely white, that's a mechanism situation, in my opinion. Or that would be what I would guess.
• 18:05
  Kayci Messerly: And so the cool part about genetics, right
• 18:07
  Phil Lavretsky: Is that we can ask this question.
• 18:09
  Kayci Messerly: We can ask this question, and someday we'll have the answers to these questions.
• 18:13
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. In a very in a very near future
• 18:15
  Kayci Messerly: Yes.
• 18:16
  Phil Lavretsky: The future is today, we will be able to answer these questions. Because we know what the genes are, but the problem is that we never had sufficient sample sizes. Right? It's in any one of our hunting careers, we might maybe get one or two in our lifetime. But Duck DNA essentially lets us get after every, well, every hunter that's willing to participate and now expand our capacity where all those lucky people who get a brewer's duck or a pintail mallard or whatever it is that year, we can then start to build a repository that would otherwise be impossible as a single person or even a few of us.
• 18:56
  Like, the probability of any of us getting one this year is so extremely low. But if we but when we ask, you know, the million hunters out there, we could do this year in and year out as we've seen with Duck DNA now where we're getting every one of these different types every single year submitted, building up these repositories that were otherwise never going to be there.
• 19:18
  Kayci Messerly: Yeah. And we're just so extremely grateful for all of the hunters that participate or apply to participate, and, like, we have a limited supply of kits at the moment, and that's unfortunate, but we are so grateful for people coming back year and year again trying to be part of this process.
• 19:36
  Katie Tucker: Because I mean and honestly, the more interest there is, the more likely we can expand in the future. So.
• 19:40
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So get your friend Apply. Grandma Apply. Anybody else that's willing to apply, your dog. Your dog.
• 19:47
  Kayci Messerly: You get Don't apply. Don't your dog. Don't do that.
• 19:50
  Phil Lavretsky: Dog retrieves? Ugh.
• 19:52
  Kayci Messerly: But we've we've had so many great birds to showcase as well. Just last month, we had Teal Timber Yes. A brainchild of Katie's here.
• 20:01
  Katie Tucker: Thank you. Goosetober this month, please follow.
• 20:04
  Kayci Messerly: Yeah. Goosetoberfest is currently going on. Spooky gooses. Yes. Which is also another brainchild of Katie's.
• 20:11
  Congratulations on being so very creative.
• 20:14
  Katie Tucker: Well, it's all thanks to the hunter sending in these birds.
• 20:16
  Kayci Messerly: I mean, this is true. But we had one very interesting TLS month.
• 20:21
  Katie Tucker: Was it perhaps a little one?
• 20:23
  Kayci Messerly: It was. A little white bird? A little white bird. Is there more you can tell us about our little white bird?
• 20:29
  Phil Lavretsky: It was a green winged teal.
• 20:30
  Kayci Messerly: It was a green winged teal? And how did we know that?
• 20:32
  Phil Lavretsky: I need to I need to caveat so everybody understands how I do this process and how this process occurs. I don't know anything about the sample except its genetics. In fact
• 20:44
  Kayci Messerly: deja vu. Right? On every podcast, we say this, and there's a reason we say this.
• 20:48
  Phil Lavretsky: There I I actually, to be fair, and my and doctor Mike Brazier can vouch for this in a future podcast if he's ever invited again, that I text him being like, that's what that bird was? Or that's what that bird looked like after seeing it on Instagram. I don't actually look at it. I just let the genetics go, and I call them I I identify the sex based on genetics, and I identify their ancestry, and then I send that off. Right?
• 21:22
  I don't look who shot it, where it was shot, what was happening, what the pictures were. I don't ask for any of that information. And so it really is completely I completely go at it, and I call everything completely blind. So this recent one, honestly, when I called it, I was like, yeah, somebody sends a green wing teal. So I've added it to our reference set.
• 21:43
  Maybe I should could I I should look at it again. But, like, yeah, I've ran it several times. Always a green winged teal. The but more importantly, that the mitochondrial is still green winged teal. And I understand that some folks have discussed that maybe this looks like a cold duck or, well, that's the only discussion, actually.
• 22:04
  And so what I need to make clear is a cold duck is part of the mallard domestic mallard complex. And so a cold duck was part of the domestication event that happened about twenty five hundred years ago in in China in the during the Ming dynasty where they started to domesticate mallards for agricultural purposes and other purposes. So you could think of the Peking duck or the Rowans or the runner ducks or cold ducks. They all stem from that sort of event. That was the wolf to dog situation.
• 22:40
  Right? So at that point, people were making whatever breed that they were interested in, whether it was for food, meaning fatter, better better meat, or for more egg production, larger eggs, larger clutches. All of those kinds of traits have been picked on, picked for by people throughout time for various reasons. We'll eventually, I'm sure, talk about game farm mallards, which only in the last two months have I understood or visualized in my own brain that it's actually a distinct domestication event. It was not part of this old domestication event because it was King Charles the second that told somebody to go out and get wild mallard eggs, bring them to captivity to once again propagate.
• 23:22
  So it's it's not like somebody going out like, oh, let's get a Pekin' duck and turn it back to a mallard looking thing. That it was completely distinct. But a cold duck is very much in this larger, older domestication event, and thus, they carry old world a mitochondrial lineage.
• 23:41
  Kayci Messerly: And so you mentioned this mitochondrial lineage, and for those of us who maybe are a last reference to the mitochondria is that it's the powerhouse of the cell. Right?
• 23:51
  Phil Lavretsky: I I mean, that'd be amazing if that was the last thing
• 23:54
  Kayci Messerly: you knew about it. But you you have the mitochondrial DNA that you're talking about Yes. And then you also have an additional type of DNA that you're looking at. So it's not one source of information that you're Correct. Looking at for each of these.
• 24:09
  Phil Lavretsky: So for every sample, if you have a certificate or look or googling it up right now, you would see that you have two source of information. One tells you ancestral proportions. This is like your mom and dad. Who was your mom and dad? Was it was mom a pintail or your dad a mallard or they were both pintails and thus you're that's why you're a 100% pintail?
• 24:33
  That's what that tells us. And when you are a hybrid, it's that's when the mitochondrial lineage is increasingly important because the mitochondrial is only mom. And so mom gives the mitochondrial DNA to all her kids, the same exact one. Dad does not provide any of that material. Anybody who's listening right now, your brothers and your sisters, all have the same mitochondrial lineage.
• 24:56
  It's completely the same. And so in that case right? So as I said, if I see that an individual's 50% Mallard and 50% Pintail and the mitochondrial is Pintail, I knew that mom must have been a Pintail and dad was the green head. And that's how we can start figuring those things out. And in this call non call duck situation, if it was a call duck, it would it would not only not have a a green wing teal mitochondrial lineage, but it would it the and it it would have a a Mallard mitochondrial lineage.
• 25:33
  On top of it, it would also ancestrally run closer to our Khaki Campbell reference set than anything else.
• 25:48
  VO: Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey. After these messages.
• 26:05
  Kayci Messerly: For those of you that are listening right now, we recently did a podcast that kind of shows some of this mapping and grouping that we've been talking about. So if you go back and listen to that, there's also visuals associated with that that'll help you kind of visualize some of that grouping that Phil's been talking about as well.
• 26:21
  Phil Lavretsky: So the the main point here is that this sample was a 100% and ancestrally a 100% green winged teal and it carried a green winged teal mitochondrial haplotype, which is almost two two million years removed from a Mallard mitochondrial haplotype. It's not a Mallard. I don't know how to make it any better.
• 26:40
  Kayci Messerly: No. I think that was great and a lot to unpack there. We talked too about knowing, you know, we can identify who the mom and the dad is, and we've seen some of these really cool visual characteristics where sometimes it doesn't really look that much like mom or dad. Sometimes there's some characteristics that are coming in that are a little bit in between something else coming in. Can you help us understand where these characteristics are coming from?
• 27:08
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. What a great question.
• 27:10
  Katie Tucker: I mean,
• 27:10
  Phil Lavretsky: I Is it like
• 27:11
  Katie Tucker: the verstuck with like the cheek patch situation? Like that kind of thing?
• 27:15
  Kayci Messerly: It can be a cheek patch. We've also had a couple of blue wing teal, cinnamon teal hybrids that then show some shoveler like traits color wise, or shoveler blue winged teal. We've had a couple that maybe there's some extra coloration you wouldn't necessarily expect between the two individuals.
• 27:32
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So so in the genetic world, that's called transgressive expression, where you where the hybrid the combination of genes between two distinct parental pools results in an individual that expresses a trait that neither of the parents actually have. Now for the blue wing group, closely related, and in which case, it's very likely that those genes are there, but they are suppressed in certain of the species. So a blue wing a blue wing teal and a cinnamon teal don't express the green in the head like the shut northern shoveler. But when put together, the mechanism that suppresses that likely became malfunctioning, and thus you get a bit of that green.
• 28:16
  The real questions and the real answers to that will only come about once we have enough of these samples. We're starting to get close to trying to map out a brewer's duck, so the Gadigal Mallard because peep enough people have sent in the the definitely not not nearly as many as we really need to do this, but trying to figure out if the expression in a brewer's duck is stochastic or random. And so it's just dependent on what what the pair who the parents are and how those g genomes kind of interacted, or is it predictable? Like, are there traits that are really predictable and constantly seen in those in those brewer's duck? Again, the only way to do this completely unfeasible only five years ago is to amass a dataset that has enough of that variation to start asking that question, and only through Duck DNA currently have we been able to achieve it.
• 29:14
  Kayci Messerly: Yeah. And so you you talk about how that those genomes interact with each other. When you say that, you mean how it's mixing they mix. How they mix together.
• 29:24
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So so imagine you have a gene and it needs to stay to it needs to stay whole to make the the cinnamon color. And if you break it, it's not very good at making cinnamon. It makes more of like a brownish or maybe even a green. Right?
• 29:42
  And so if the two parents come together and break at that point and maybe either maybe malfunctioning or slightly okay or maybe it puts together a green and a red, not all of a sudden you get other types of colors, then that is when that's the mixing that we're talking about, and we don't know how that mixes. We're hoping to start some new analyses. Like I said earlier, we are just getting to the point where we have enough of the parent a and the parent b of all these types and the hybrids to start asking what parts of the genome are responsible for some of these traits. And so, yeah, hopefully, in the next year or two with the increasing number of samples from Duck DNA, work in my lab, we're gonna start mapping out where these traits are and whether they're predictable. Right?
• 30:32
  So is the green head on a mallard the same location as a green head on a northern shoveler? That's never been really asked because nobody's been able to do it. So, hopefully and the same thing could go for, like, right, the colorations of the of reds and oranges, are they the same processes across all these species? And when they get broken down, do they do they result in the same trait changes in the hybrid?
• 30:58
  Katie Tucker: Not to get too nerdy, but the blue in bird feathers actually isn't a pigment. Structural. So that's interesting when you're talking about hybridization with different colors of feathers. Yeah. There's a blue tint coming in, and that's totally not even related to a pigment coming from the bird.
• 31:12
  Phil Lavretsky: But to make that blue requires a structure, and the structure is genetics. Yes. Because you need the structure to be in a specific way. It nobody can see my hands, so, like, I don't know what I'm doing. But, like, I'm creating a lattice with my hands, and if that lattice changes direction, the way the light hits it would will change it, and thus the coloration changes.
• 31:33
  Katie Tucker: So when I see, like, a a purple feather, I'm like, oh, blue and red. Crazy. But I have a coming back to the blue winged Ducks, I have a question. We've had some comments about the Northern shoveler Blue Winged Teal hybrids and their similarity to the Australasian shoveler.
• 31:47
  Phil Lavretsky: Oh, that they look the same?
• 31:48
  Katie Tucker: Yeah. Does that say anything about their relatedness? Just that they look similar?
• 31:51
  Phil Lavretsky: I mean, so the Australasian shoveler is still part of the shoveler group, just like the red shoveler. So they're all part of the they're still all part of the blue wing group. Right? What that actually tells me is something mixed, and for whatever reason in the Australasian shoveler, that was the trait that was either beneficial in that ecology or the females began to pick on, right, the sort of mating situation, and that's what took off. Right?
• 32:18
  But you're right. That's a great question. If we go to an Australasian shovel, which we have two in my freezer, do we does the genetics line up that results in the phenotype of a hybrid? Is it the same exact mechanism that results in the Australasian shovel?
• 32:34
  Katie Tucker: You tell us.
• 32:35
  Phil Lavretsky: I one day. But that's great. Now I gotta go back to work, and it's like 11PM.
• 32:41
  Kayci Messerly: Come on, you gotta get on it. It's only 09:40. Them now.
• 32:43
  Katie Tucker: You got another hour.
• 32:45
  Kayci Messerly: You talked about the potential to kind of map some of these characteristics so that people can understand where these traits are coming from. Where is this information coming from so you know where to map it? Is it all coming out of your lab? Is this information that's been built over time you have resources to?
• 33:05
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, yeah. So a combination of a lot of that. So for a very long so there's a whole bunch of other labs that are trying to understand genetic mechanisms. So like, what does this gene do, or what does that gene do? And so they'll map.
• 33:21
  They'll figure out what they are by doing a whole bunch of different experiments. A lot of it comes from mammalian systems, because obviously that's what we study. And so what we're a lot of that is mapped that way, and so we have to make some additional inferences. Right? So if we have a gene that is quote, unquote, coded for hair follicle growth as it would be in a mammal, we would think that that's a gene important for feather growth as well.
• 33:49
  We'd have to make that leap. That being said, color in birds has been studied extensively. Many of those genes have been mapped. They're particularly on, as we had talked about earlier, on the sex chromosome, but also on chromosome one. And luckily enough, our markers are hitting those locations.
• 34:07
  I know this because we've looked at this. And so because of that, we can start looking how many of these genes are associated to particular traits and and whether they are, right, or whether it's some other thing that we don't know about. So the nice thing is that the genome is generally mapped through all through all of these other research programs and and work and studies across the world, and we can use that information to make additional inferences and start mapping it out that way. If anybody's done 23 and Me when it was alive or ancestry.com and you have all these things, you're like, oh, you are, you know, you have a ten percent chance of having diabetes because you have these genes. We can do the same thing, except it'd be like, that's why this bird had a red patch.
• 34:56
  Kayci Messerly: That's super cool. Getting very close to some very exciting things for sure. But it it is exciting how all of this can build upon each other. You know, this information that's out there can inform these new findings that we're having and allows us to target specific characteristics that we're looking for. Another aspect, you know, that about this is that we're not just looking for visual characteristics.
• 35:23
  That's some of the most obvious things for someone out in the field who's got the bird in hand, right, but genetics is so much more too, than just what we see on the surface of the bird. What are some of the other things that your lab is diving into or is really interested in that maybe is not something we can just see?
• 35:43
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, I mean, so a lot of the things that we're that we're diving into the underneath the, like, the the the feathers really having to do and, obviously, we can expand on this for any other species. But we're right now super keen in understanding how the domestication process has changed the game farm mallard from its wild ancestor. So you guys got to listen to some of the talks from, you know, little speed talks, although they're supposed to be speedy, they weren't sometimes, but, like, some of the things that we're doing. And we're throwing kitchen sink at this thing and and trying to figure out, okay. Genetically, these things are different.
• 36:22
  Can we tie it to a a true mechanism? Can we tie it to that the brains are different, that their functionality is different, that their metabolism is different, that their feeding efficiency is different, that the survive that their migratory behavior is different, that the survival is different, that their habitat choices are all different. And right now, we've been able to have a pretty amazingly, so genetic link association to all of those traits. Right? We know that some proportion of those traits are explained by genetics, and there's always environment, obviously.
• 36:57
  The just like you your own height. Right? Obviously, I was supposed to be an awesome football player, but I just didn't get the right environment, and I never got picked by the 49ers. So I'm a geneticist. So that that's that in a nutshell is is what it everything's got genetics and environment that explain the trait itself.
• 37:20
  And we're trying to dive into how much does the genetics play a role. And currently, all of the traits we've looked at have we've identified that the ancestry of those individuals dictates the trait at a really high correlation. And now what we're able to do, as we talked about earlier, because we have all this genetic material, we can pinpoint where on the genome that has changed and how it's changed that explains the brain change, that the migratory behavioral changes, the physiological changes, the behavioral changes. All of these things have a genetic component, and we're racing to find them.
• 38:01
  Kayci Messerly: And so all of these characteristics, whether they're physiological, behavioral, you know, these visual characteristics that people can see, are spread throughout the genome? They're close by to each other?
• 38:15
  Phil Lavretsky: We don't know.
• 38:16
  Kayci Messerly: It could be any of these things.
• 38:17
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So every chromosome that mom and dad gave you has an important role to play. Much like you, they all have an important role to play for a duck, right? So migration might be several genes on several chromosomes. The brain might be a few genes on one chromosome.
• 38:36
  Right? They're all together. They all have to be together in a particular way to make a wild brain that knows it's time to migrate. It's time to feed. It's time to nest.
• 38:46
  All of those innate responses that these things have. And so that's what we're that's a bottom line of my research program is to also understand how much of this is how much is genetics responsible and where in the genome. And is it always the same ones when you're looking at different species? Did it independently evolve in a to migrate in a in a pintail as it did in a mallard? Like, we can start asking those kinds of questions as we build this data up.
• 39:16
  On top and on top of it, we know where these birds went. We know how what tie the timing of their migration. We know where they were harvested so we can extract the information, whether it was rural or whether it was urban, and whether the and so we can start testing if there's genetic changes that are resulting at a population level for birds to all of a sudden be more or less overt to urban settings. Just that simple question. You know?
• 39:44
  Are mallards doing better in urban settings just because they're domestic, or there's a change? You know? These kinds of questions. Are pintail and other more wild birds or averting from those locations more so than others? Right?
• 39:57
  So these kinds of questions we can start asking.
• 39:59
  Katie Tucker: And this is thanks to the hunter scientists from Duck DNA.
• 40:02
  Phil Lavretsky: 100%. Thank you.
• 40:04
  Kayci Messerly: And so so you're talking about these selection pressures that can help, you know, kind of these changes one way or the other. Are there certain areas that are just naturally more likely to pick up these changes, or certain areas that are less likely to be changed, remixed?
• 40:22
  Phil Lavretsky: So evolution So these changes evolved over eons. Right? Generations of pintail and mallards and green winged teal all surviving and breeding, and the next generation hopefully being better than the previous. Right? And the if things rapidly change like it did for the dinosaurs or the mammoths, they die.
• 40:46
  Right? They can't keep up with change at that kind of pace. It takes a long it's a long process. It's not like, hey, polar bear, you know, get ready to come to El Paso. You know?
• 40:56
  That's not gonna work out because they become they were so well adapted to the ecology that they had. Right? That they went so far ahead that there really is nothing else that they can be good at. What ducks are good at, though, their adaptability, quote, unquote, is the fact that they're able if there is water, they can find it. And so whether they have to fly a few more 100 kilometers north to find it in the Northwest Territories now rather than the prairie potholes is another kind of question.
• 41:26
  Right? There it but they have to have that innate response to go find it. It's kinda like salmon. They have to they have to have the capacity to swim swim upstream to make kids, but so many captive salmon lose that trait, and in which case, you could have a whole bunch of salmon out there, but nobody's coming up.
• 41:44
  Kayci Messerly: I think as we we've been here over the past couple of days, which feels like so much longer, but also that we need so much more time here at the same time, we've had a great time going through the lab. We've seen Hunter's notes that have been sent in from participants that have sent their samples in and got to speak to Virgie and Victoria about how those little notes can really brighten your day and get you excited about the next run that you're doing and all of that excitement. What has been some of the most interesting and exciting things that have come out of this for you that maybe you didn't even expect over the last few years?
• 42:23
  Phil Lavretsky: Well, I didn't expect any notes. And to be fair, I don't actually see those notes. So the samples come in and my team gets them.
• 42:30
  Kayci Messerly: They don't tell you?
• 42:31
  Phil Lavretsky: They don't even tell me.
• 42:32
  Kayci Messerly: Oh, no.
• 42:33
  Phil Lavretsky: And so and so I want you to you, the audience, and those that are participating in Duck DNA, to please go ahead and write those notes. My team loves those notes, and you're right. Like, after a good, you know, me shaking my finger and being really angry moment, those notes keep them, you know, happy and alive and wanting to process your samples as fast as possible, and and, yeah, it does it does cheer them up. They loved all the notes that they get through the program in the boxes themselves. Me, on my end, is the fact that we are going into year three.
• 43:11
  I didn't even under I didn't see that coming. The fact that other people are just as excited as I was when me and and Mike Brazier had this conversation, and then I was sitting in a duck blind. I'd be like, yeah. That this would be super awesome as I shot a green head, and I'm like, god. I hope there's no Game Farm genes in this thing.
• 43:31
  And I'm like, I wonder if anybody else would have that thought. And now we know that there's a ton of folks, and I'm appreciative of that. That's been the biggest light bulb moment or or or whatever you wanna call it at this hour.
• 43:44
  Kayci Messerly: I think we as scientists just get so excited and kind of into our work that we get very passionate about it, and sometimes that passion may not be shared by a wide group or a wide audience, and to get to see that actually happen and take light and people really love and pour into this project has been just insane. And those notes of enthusiasm and encouragement go a long way too.
• 44:11
  Phil Lavretsky: Oh,
• 44:11
  Katie Tucker: yeah. And the email's to us too. Yes. DuckDNAdux dot org. Just and like, I come from a laboratory science background and just interacting with members of the public that care about all of this stuff just as much as I do, like, literally brings tears to my eyes sometimes.
• 44:25
  I'm just so grateful
• 44:26
  Kayci Messerly: to work with the hunters that that are so invested in the wildlife. Yeah, it's a very rewarding and humbling experience, and to get to sit down with you and your team and the people that have built this, you know, from the ground up, birthed it into existence, you know, with the support and power of the hunters behind the project, it has been just very humbling and incredible over the time we've got to spend with it.
• 44:53
  Phil Lavretsky: Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't say it any better. But I did wanna I did wanna say that some things on the horizon that we're hoping to get the timetable figured out, you know, for this year, we're still looking at that eight to ten weeks. And in all honesty, the reason behind that is the fact that hunting seasons align with holiday season. And so places shut down.
• 45:19
  We have to wait to send out sequences, especially for those of you who finish out your seasons at the November. Right? You're sending it in. A lot of the the sequencing facilities are closed come even as early as December 15. And they and and then UTEP itself is closed, and it doesn't even open till, like, mid January.
• 45:42
  And so we're constantly battling this this you know, juggling these dates and trying to get ahead of it all the time. But sometimes it's just impossible because, you know, you've gotta wait for others and the you know, these pumpkin spice lattes.
• 45:58
  Kayci Messerly: So Don't hate on the pumpkin spice lattes. No. That's gonna be a problem.
• 46:02
  Phil Lavretsky: But I will say, and you guys saw it. It's not operational, but, like, we do have a robot. We hope that that is going to actually quicken the pace. We're gonna we're gonna implement it, I hope, this year for the first time. We'll see what that looks like.
• 46:17
  We'll play around with the its abilities and to see how we can maximize its output to minimize time to completion. But, again, everybody who's listening and participating, you know, think about it as an eight to ten week kind of process from you sending it out to you receiving your certificates.
• 46:38
  Kayci Messerly: A reminder that science is a process. We learn as we go. Science takes time, and this is probably one of the most rapid turnarounds I've seen in any science that I've been a part of.
• 46:48
  Phil Lavretsky: Genetics in particular, which used to be years Yeah. Sometimes in the years to the And so it's always been my goal to be able to get things to the point where genetics is a tool that provides information within the management time frame. And I think we're getting there. So
• 47:11
  Kayci Messerly: And ask your questions. Continue to fuel the curiosity. Curiosity. That's something that gets us engaged and encouraged as well. Ask the questions you have.
• 47:20
  Don't be afraid. We have lots of answers and if we don't know, we just find Phil and we shove him in the comments section. Yes.
• 47:27
  Phil Lavretsky: Absolutely. And I was gonna say, you can get ahold of me through various ways, through the Duck DNA team or you can even contact me directly. Instagram is at, lavretskylab or it's, plavretsky@utep.edu. You could just find my email at our lab website. If you just do the doctor Phil Ducks genetics on Google, I'm sure you could find
• 47:51
  Kayci Messerly: it. But they know how
• 47:51
  Katie Tucker: to spell your last name by now, probably.
• 47:53
  Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. It's Gretsky with love, loveretsky.
• 47:57
  Kayci Messerly: Well, thank you for sitting down with us, Phil. After a a long couple of days, we stole your night hours away from you as well. We really appreciate it and our audience does too. We look forward to doing this hopefully again real soon.
• 48:11
  Phil Lavretsky: Next time at your house.
• 48:12
  Kayci Messerly: Next time in Memphis. Okay. A special thanks to our guests, doctor Phil Lebretsky, Katie Tucker, and our producers, as well as, of course, our listeners. And thank you for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.
• 48:29
  VO: Thank you for listening to the DU podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cock Tails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly.
• 48:51
  Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited. Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.