Fossils Suggest Niche Similarities Between Wild Turkeys in California and Extinct California Turkeys

Pleistocene fossil data reveal that the introduced Wild Turkeys in California, commonly considered a pest, could be important ecological substitutes for the extinct California Turkeys.

Ever since I was a young child, I have been fascinated by the natural world, especially birds. As I explored the outdoors, I became more and more curious about how these birds interacted with the spectacular environments around them, which initially piqued my interest in avian ecology. When I moved to California in 2018, I became acquainted with many new and magnificent birds. As I explored California landscapes, one of the most ubiquitous birds I found was the Wild Turkey, the warier, leaner progenitor of the familiar domesticated bird. I soon learned that despite the turkey's abundance, it was not native to California – rather, it had been introduced during the 20th century for hunting purposes.

As I learned more about the history of the species in California, I became aware of the massive, unresolved debates between various stakeholders on turkey management in the state. Hunters desired turkey populations to be periodically bolstered and actively promoted for hunting purposes. At the same time, environmental advocates and ecologists, conscious of a long history of species introductions going awry and resulting in invasiveness, often called for the removal of turkeys from the landscape. As is typical for introduced species, the science on the species' actual ecological impact was scarce and unclear. Were turkeys an innocuous addition to California's biota or a species invasion in the making?

I was cognizant of this problem when, in early 2019, I visited the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles. While touring the museum's collections, I found out that hundreds of fossils of the California Turkey – an extinct species, closely related to the Wild Turkey, of which I had never heard before – had been discovered all over Southern California. Some of the most recent ones dated to just over 10,000 years ago. At this point, I was already working with Dr. Alexis Mychajliw, a researcher at the Tar Pits, on a project utilizing conservation paleobiology. This is an emerging field focusing on using clues from the geologic past to answer questions about ecosystems today.

Already in the mindset of connecting the past with the present, I began to wonder. If turkeys were present here in California, then surely there had to be a vacant niche carved into the ecosystem for them. The question that began to captivate me was whether the introduced turkeys in California were re-occupying that vacant niche, thus offering valuable ecosystem functions, or whether they were "ignoring" that niche entirely and acting like an invasive species. Under Dr. Mychajliw's guidance, I would use fossil-based species distribution modeling – a new avian ecology technique – to help answer this question.

Next year, I worked on this project with Dr. Mychajliw's as my mentor. I reconstructed a counterfactual distribution for the California Turkey in modern-day California. I determined that there is a high degree of niche similarity between the Wild Turkey and the California Turkey. The former likely is at least partially re-occupying the latter's niche. During this process, I also received guidance from the Southern California Academy of Sciences Research Training Program, learning the best practices for writing an academic paper. In early 2021, I presented my work at the SCAS annual conference, where I was selected to attend the AJAS meeting in February of 2022, bringing me to where I am right now.

This section contains the project’s research paper link. To protect my intellectual property, I have not shared my lab notebook.