Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum Map of Alabama deer restocking program

Here’s something else that should hold true as it concerns natural selection selecting for rut dates and the idea of “dilution” being false……..Let’s use our green area of Macon Co I highlighted above as our example……Let’s say we hypothetically take 25 does out of Bankhead Forest all with tight November breeding dates and we transplant them into the center of our green Macon Co area. So next year that is going to give us most of our fawns in the green area dropping at the end of August but we also have the ones from our transplanted 25 that drop in late June……Now to show how natural selection would impact this and not "dilution"......I'm just making this up but lets just say that coyotes drop their pups around the end of July and after having their pups they heavily increase hunting for new fawns to feed their pups…….So fawn predation after they have their pups is much, much higher than before…….In this scenario natural selection would start choosing for a higher survival rate of the female offspring of the 25 we transplanted that are born in late June and their November rut timing would begin to grow outward from the epicenter of the release area in a slow replacement process. Now, lets just say that this difference in coyote predation didn’t exist…..again I just made this situation up to represent an environmental influence……but if there was nothing to differentiate fawn survival like this then what would likely happen would be that the Nov estrous does would remain very isolated and their lines eventually may die out because their few fawns would be such outliers when they dropped and the only ones on the ground at the time.