This Turkey Tuesday is about multi-paternity, which results in poults within a single clutch having different fathers. Multi-paternity is common in monogamous birds such as many songbirds but is not well described in species that use a mating system like the wild turkey. Recent research showed that 56% of hatched clutches were the result of a single hen and tom, so all poults were full siblings. However, the other 44% of clutches had multi-paternity present, wherein multiple toms fertilized eggs, so some poults in the clutch were only half-siblings. Its thought that the primary benefit of multi-paternity is to maximize genetic diversity in the clutch, and as a strategy for the hen to obtain the best genes for her poults – this makes sense, given that hens can assess the quality of a tom by his appearance, behavior, and dominance status. So why would some hens breed with multiple toms, whereas others do not? The answer is unclear, but plausible explanations abound – perhaps some hens don’t have access to toms and are therefore constrained to producing clutches from a single tom, or maybe individual hens take different breeding strategies because of other factors science hasn’t dug into. Regardless, if you’re interested in ongoing research on multi-paternity in wild turkeys, it’s posted under Research. The take home is wild turkey hens use multiple strategies when breeding season rolls around, which results in interesting genetic make-up in the broods we observe.
Pics by RC Gilliland
