Welcome to Wild Turkey Science, a podcast made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow.

I'm Dr. Marcus Lashley, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida.

And I'm Dr. Will Gulsby, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management at Auburn University.

We're both lifelong hunters and devoted scientists who are passionate about hunting, managing, and researching wild turkeys.

In this podcast, we'll explore turkey research, speak to the experts in the field,

and address the difficult questions related to wild turkey ecology and management.

Our goal is to serve as your connection to wild turkey science.

The questions I had, and you'll have to forgive my ignorance, but what is the point of, like, what are you going to actually get from the genetic data in layman's terms?

Like, what is it going to tell you?

Well, that's a good question, and I'd love to pass the microphone over to the Ph.D. student who's down in South Texas right now. Yes. Well, we're working on getting those guys in here, too. Yeah, yeah. We'll get more detailed information from them. Evan and Randy and Michael Barrett is the Ph.D. student. So they're still working on that.

But, but yeah, in layman's terms, you know, the part and selfishly,

maybe the part I'm most interested in is, you know, from a landscape level perspective,

you think about things like highways or increasingly in some parts of Oklahoma where we've got changing land cover, you know, to and from ag, ranch land.

In some places, energy extraction, right?

Or when, you know, so extractive like oil and natural gas, but also wind farms.

Depending on where we're at, and I'm not saying that impacts every place equally, but

all of a sudden that landscape starts to look a lot different.

And what genetics might be able to show us is whether or not there's actual gene flow

from one area to the next because we might look at the map and think, well, that's, yeah,

turkey, that's connected.

Turkey could just do this, but they might not perceive it that way.

And if you strapped on enough backpacks, you probably could get at that answer eventually because you'd say, man, we've trapped a bunch of turkeys over here and a bunch of turkeys over here.

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