Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
(KRT)
MILWAUKEE - A lucky deer hunter in south Texas notonly got to kill and mount the trophy of a lifetime, but- using a strip of its skin, some ice and a postagestamp - he also got a team of scientists to clone it.
Veterinarians at Texas A&M University in CollegeStation, Texas, announced last week that they hadsuccessfully cloned the first white-tailed deer.
Dewey, who is nearly 7 months old, appears to behealthy and is developing normally, said Mark Westhusin,a leading researcher on the team.
But conservationists, game managers and biologists arewondering just how healthy this scientific achievementwill be for wild deer - and wondering what good, if any,comes from cloning such a widespread and numerousspecies.
We've always been interested in cloning wildlife,''said Westhusin, whose team has also cloned a calico catnamed cc, a few pigs, a Boer goat and adisease-resistant Angus cow. And deer are a huge dealhere (in Texas).
Every year, someone has harvested a big deer andsent us its testicles,'' hoping the team could performsome reproductive magic - enabling the magnificent killto sire postmortem, Westhusin said. But, semen is so sensitive,’’ he said, and itgenerally won’t make the journey from kill to scientistvia mail.
Two years ago, a hunter sent in the testicles of adeer that had racked in at 230 points on the Boone andCrockett system for measuring antlers. In order for adeer to be included in the record book, it must measureat least 160 points.
The semen was useless.
But, on a lark, Westhusin got one of his classes toextract cells from the skin surrounding the big buck’stestes and insert them into eggs rid of genetic materialto see whether they could impregnate a doe.
It worked.
The first trial, which consisted of four,captive-bred, recipient does, yielded three pregnanciesand one healthy fawn - although Westhusin thinks twinfawns would have made it if a mishap during a C-sectionhadn’t occurred.
We couldn't believe it,'' said Westhusin, referringto the trial's success. I was wondering who had letthe buck in.’’
In general, cloning is an inefficient procedure -often taking hundreds of trials before a healthy cloneis produced.
Which makes Westhusin wonder whether there issomething about deer that makes them especially ripe forsuch a procedure.
White-tailed deer are so fecund in the wild,'' hesaid. Maybe they are an easier species to work with.’’
However, a second trial conducted by the team - thistime using eight wild does as carriers - resulted in nopregnancies.
The stress level in wild deer is a bit higher'' thanin tame deer, Westhusin said. He suspects this may havehad something to do with the second trial's failure. Next time, he said, they'll go back to tame does. One thing his team would like to learn from thisresearch is how antler size and growth are determined.What role do the environment and genetics play? For instance, will Dewey have as big a rack as hisgenetically identical father? Valerius Geist, a retired professor of environmentalscience at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada,believes this is already well-known. As a rule of thumb, shape is more under geneticcontrol than size,’’ he said. But antlers are shaped -powerfully - by the environment, by net nutrition, byinjuries to the body and by trauma to the antlers.'' (EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) He did say, however, that he was happy to see basicresearch proceed’’ and that cloning has already donesome good in dispelling simplistic notions about geneactivity.'' Westhusin's team sees this research as playing a rolein deer conservation. Hunters and breeders would like to conserve thegenetics of their trophies,’’ Westhusin said. I mean,when you think about it, once you shoot a trophy, it'sdead. And there's no way it's going to get back up andstart breeding.'' But Geist dismissed this argument. The claim that it is done for conservation I wouldaccept with a stiff pinch of salt,’’ he said. It's oneway to justify basic research to funding agencies. Thereis nothing here to get excited about.'' And Keith McCaffery, a retired deer biologist with theWisconsin Department of Natural Resources, thinks theconservation claim is nonsense. In any case, if trophy hunters think these clones canbe claimed in the record books, they've got anotherthing coming, said Keith Balfourd, marketing coordinatorand official measurer for the Boone and Crockett Club. Clones would not be acceptable entries,’’ he said.
However, that’s not officially in the club’s rule book- yet.