Thread: A question in deer genetics

He wrote a book, you can get them online
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Still working on the genetic side, but did stumble upon colour vision in fallow deer with the abstract (summary) of the paper bellow:

To examine whether fallow deer, Dama dama, have colour vision, we trained four adult females on a two-choice discrimination task, where a positive chromatic stimulus (green) and a negative achromatic stimulus (grey) had similar brightness. The criterion for learning was set at 80% correct responses. To exclude the possibility that the hinds used small differences in brightness to distinguish between the green and the grey stimulus, we conducted a test that differed from the training situation. A light green positive stimulus combined with a dark grey negative stimulus was alternated with a dark green positive stimulus combined with a light grey negative stimulus on every second trial. The positive green stimuli had different reflectance spectra. After training, each of the four hinds showed over 80% correct responses in the test. These results suggest that fallow deer can use colour vision in a discrimination situation by generalizing over slightly different colours, at least in the range of the green spectrum.

Getting closer but not quite there. It seems the old fallow don't necessarily have an advantage when it comes to mating season:

Background

Assortative mating can help explain how genetic variation for male quality is maintained even in highly polygynous species. Here, we present a longitudinal study examining how female and male ages, as well as male social dominance, affect assortative mating in fallow deer (Dama dama) over 10 years. Assortative mating could help explain the substantial proportion of females that do not mate with prime-aged, high ranking males, despite very high mating skew. We investigated the temporal pattern of female and male matings, and the relationship between female age and the age and dominance of their mates.

Results

The peak of yearling female matings was four days later than the peak for older females. Younger females, and especially yearlings, mated with younger and lower-ranking males than older females. Similarly, young males and lower-ranking males mated with younger females than older males and higher-ranking males. Furthermore, the timing of matings by young males coincided with the peak of yearling female matings, whereas the timing of older male matings (irrespective of rank) coincided with the peak of older female matings.

Conclusions

Assortative mating, through a combination of indirect and/or direct female mate choice, can help explain the persistence of genetic variation for male traits associated with reproductive success.

There are a few interesting papers done on mating systems as fallow use several different ones. The "lek" system has been shown to be the most productive which is very interesting for a deer species I think.