Coues blood in Carmens?

[Red Rabbit]

Interesting comment by Ray Aktinson in this thread about the coues being introduced to the Big Bend region of Texas. Does this infer that the Carmen Mountain Whitetail may actually be coues, or the Carmens may have had their gene pool polluted? I am unsure about the date that the Carmens were first recognized.

How does B&C or geneticists recognize the the Carmen sub-species?

 

http://www.huntamerica.com/wwwthreads/show...0&page=0#559159

 

Doug / Red Rabbit

[Benbrown]

For many years, I was a white-tailed deer biologist in Texas, and worked all over the state. Later, I supervised the range specialists for the General Land Office who worked out of the Alpine office north of the Big Bend Park, one of whom was a long-time wildlife biologist who had spent his entire career in the Trans-Pecos. Despite spending hours talking about deer with most of the wildlife professionals, I never heard of any attempts to introduce, reintroduce, or supplement del Carmen whitetails.

 

Texans have transplanted just about every critter imaginable, native and exotic, throughout the state and Texas whitetails of several subspecies have been exported to just about every area of the United States. I suppose that it is not inconceivable that Coues were brought into west Texas, but I doubt it for two reasons: (1) they are not very abundant anywhere and numbers were especially low during the 1930s, and (2) they would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to trap with the methods that were commonly used back then.

 

Fortunately, the CCC kept really good records of all of their projects, and it would not be difficult to determine whether or not there really were projects undertaken to move Coues deer to west Texas. If I can find the time, I will try to research this a little bit and see if there are any records of the CCC boys moving Coues to West Texas.

 

As Jim Hefflefinger noted, in a post forwarded a while back by someone else, the del Carmen whitetails and the Coues are at the opposite end of a cline that extends down into Mexico and across to southern New Mexico and Arizona. I seriously doubt that there is really much genetic difference. Both are ecotypes (morphological variations) that are adapted to life in the Sky Island mountain ranges.

 

A young man at NAU is finishing up his dissertation on the genetics of Coues and has seemingly done a really good job of gathering genetic material from throughout their range of occurrence. Once he has completed his analyses and interpretations, we will know a lot more about how these isolated populations relate to one another.

[Arizona Griz]

Very interesting information on both accounts. I would like to think and believe that the Carmen Mountain Whitetails of Texas are an isolated subspecies of the White-tailed Deer. I guess we will have to leave it to the taxonimists.