Learn how female deer influence antler development with the Gamekeepers of Mossy Oak. Be sure to subscribe to our channel, and catch GameKeepers each week on the Outdoor channel. Tuesday nights at 8pm CST.
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Half of the DNA material obviously comes from the doe but more than DNA, you know, so she’s raising those fawns, especially in their first year of life and so let’s say if she only has one fawn to provide milk for versus two, you know, so she only has one she can give that one fawn a lot more nourishing than maybe she can two, and so on. And I think you know some of our other research has shown also that some of these older does that are three or four years and older, you know they’re physically mature, they can put on a lot better condition, and they’re just more experienced and more able to give some nourishment to the offspring and so we don’t know anything about the dose that these bucks come off of because we weren’t able to monitor that segment, but some of that, those differences among young bucks is probably just due to, you know, whether they were a single or a twin whether their mom was an adult or a younger one. And, you know, maybe just to a whole bunch of other random things you know did that fawn get sick as a young individual did it. Did it just happen to you hurt itself or something as a young individual, a lot of different factors can come into play that we can’t necessarily directly track, but any one of those can affect their, you know their development later in life.
