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Ongoing research in Mississippi is developing new ways to gauge turkey populations.
One of the most important elements of wild turkey management is estimating turkey populations, and gauging whether these are stable, increasing, or decreasing. That said, this is no simple task, and many of the methods long used are less effective than researchers would like. Simply, we need better population estimation techniques.
As such, TFT is excited to report on an ongoing research effort that it and other partners are supporting. A new turkey research technique is being tested to determine the efficacy of its deployment in wild turkey science and management. The preliminary results showcase great success.
Currently, a significant effort is being conducted across eight research sites in Mississippi, including a mix of private and public lands. These include Chickasaw WMA, Choctaw WMA, Little Biloxi WMA, Wolf River WMA, as well as private lands in Hancock, Jefferson, Kemper, and Marshall Counties.
“The goal is to see if this technique will allow us to know exactly how many turkeys are using particular properties,” said Adam B. Butler, CWB, director of conservation development with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks. “One of the shortcomings in the science and management of turkeys is that they're so difficult to count. It's difficult to compare certain things against other things, such as certain management practices against other management practices, certain habitats against other habitats, etc.”
According to Butler, if you don't have an unbiased, statistical, and defensible way of saying this is how many turkeys are on this place, and this is how many turkeys are on that place, it leaves little room for good management.
“Once you have the ability to do that, it opens you up to be able to answer a lot more questions that are much more interesting,” Butler said.
Currently, the research effort covers eight different sites across Mississippi. The team selected a wide range of property types.
Dr. Dana Moran, an assistant professor of wildlife ecology with the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture at Mississippi State University, Dr. Mark McConnell with MSU, and Dr. Daniel Greene with Weyerhaeuser Co., as well as a team of technicians, have collected approximately 1,500 samples from materials turkeys left behind. These included feathers and fecal samples.
Some might wonder what technology is being used for the genetic testing. Morin says that non-invasive genetic sampling is a method that can be used to identify the species in an area. It can even be implemented to identify specific individuals in a population. It’s done from the DNA in the material they leave in the environment.
“For this study, we collected fecal droppings and feathers from turkeys across eight different sites to identify individuals and estimate turkey abundance and density for these different areas,” Morin said. “We are combining non-invasive genetic sampling (NGA) with a next-generation sequencing method called ‘genotyping in the thousands’ (GT-seq; Campbell et al. 2015). This is a fancy name for a process that allows us to get much more genetic information (more sequences) from the DNA we extract from feathers and fecal samples. We were lucky that Dr. Mike Chamberlain was willing to share with us a GT-seq panel (a set of sequencing markers that allows us to identify individuals) that was originally developed to identify individual turkeys from eggshells for one of their studies on brood parasitism. We are refining that panel to use it with the fecal and feather samples.”
Why not just keep banding turkeys, you ask? According to Butler, it’s a similar concept as banding, but with a greater degree of accuracy, consistency, and overall effectiveness. It also costs less. Banding requires more time to collect data, and the collection methods are much less consistent and reliable.
“We don't have to capture the animal,” Butler said. “Capturing the animal is very time-consuming and expensive. But if you capture the stuff they left behind in the field, you're able to say OK, this is Larry, this is Curly, and this is Moe. We know they exist. It's using a technique that people call mark-recapture, and it allows you to start estimating how many total individuals were there.”
Butler notes this does piggyback off some of the methods used in banding. That said, the genetic element vastly increases efficiency. Ultimately, it combines NGA with mark-recapture and spatial capture-recapture modeling. This provides the best of both worlds, and enhances the ability to study poult recruitment, population densities, overall survival, and more. It also helps study how harvest and other management decisions impact turkey populations.
According to Butler and other team members, the primary goals include:
“Ultimately, we hope to use the genetic identity of turkeys from fecal and feather samples we found to estimate density for turkey populations,” Morin said. “We collected samples in sites of differing habitat quality and harvest frameworks, and we would like to assess how those attributes affect population stability and change.
“We found a seasonality to the types of samples available to be collected that matched our expectations based on turkey ecology,” Morin continued. “Fecal samples were more widely available in the spring and occurred in large clusters, whereas feathers were more available in late summer. We were able to sequence data from feather samples but found that our initial extraction protocol for fecal samples did not yield enough DNA to sequence. Since that discovery, we have developed a genetic screening tool to assess fecal sample quality and are currently performing a series of extraction experiments to determine the best new protocol before completing the processing of the remaining samples. Preliminary tests look good, but we had to pause the experiment and hope to begin again in mid-April.”
Another unexpected delay, and subsequent hold up in sample processing, is the increase in avian influenza in Mississippi.
“While there is little documentation of avian influenza in turkeys in the eastern US, we are increasing our biosafety protocols out of an abundance of caution to protect students and technicians in the lab when extracting DNA from fecal samples, which may contain the avian influenza virus,” Morin said. “This has held up final sample processing by a couple months.”
Despite these small setbacks, we celebrate the overall success of this research effort, and anticipate finalized outcomes from this six-year effort. We’ll keep you updated as more information becomes available.
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