Black Feather

Just don't aggrevate them. I've seen a friend gored by a buck he raised from a fawn 4 years later. Yet, by accident my 2 year old son at the time ran up to a wild buck and started petting it. The buck just stood there--then TROTTED slowly away when hubby approached. They fight in response to hormones and survival instinct. You don't threaten them...they won't threaten you.

flintknapper

I've hunted and observed white-tailed deer for years. Deer antlers are pure bone, and are one of the fastest growing appendage in all of nature. They supposedly grow faster than some cancers. When anters shed in the late winter, new ones start growing immediately. They are covered with a fuzzy, blood rich "skin" called velvet. The bucks are always in velvet when the new fawns are born. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but a buck in velvet is far less likely to use his anters for anything aggressive. They are tender at this time.

When the velvet drops off, usually August here in central IL., the antler tines are needle sharp. They are at their most deadly as soon as the velvet is gone. Immediately, the buck starts polishing his rack on brush and trees. These are called "rubs". This polishing rounds out the needle points and actually "dulls" them somewhat. The rubbing is also used to remove the last of the velvet, to mark territory, and to just generally quell the urge rutting bucks get to tear up something. Near the bucks eyes are the preorbital scent glands. When they rub a tree trunk or branches with their rack, some of this scent is left behind for others to find. At this time, they also make "scrapes" on the ground and urinate on the spot marking it for does and other bucks, like a calling card so they can be found.

Also at this time, a buck's testosterone starts to increase, their neck swells up like an NFL linebacker on steroids and they will begin to get more aggressive. Testosterone peaks during the rut, and just before the does go into estrus. This is when a buck is the most dangerous. A large trophy buck in full rut is a sight to see...and smell. The buck urinates on his back legs, letting the urine run down his tarsal glands on the inside hocks of his back legs, and you can smell them for quite a distance. When challenged, they will walk stiff legged with slober coming out of one end and urine coming out of the other and the hair on the back of their neck straight up. They'll fight anything in their way, including people. Luckily, this only last a week or two.

While the rack is used for protection and for fighting to determining the peck order for breeding, there is also another important use for them. When the doe approaches estrus, the buck will separate the doe from the harem (if he's a dominant buck, he'll usually have several does in waiting) and move her to an isolated area for breeding. The way he moves her is with his rack. He'll herd her exactly where he wants her to go, preferably away from any other bucks, then breed her when she's ready. I've seen bucks thrash uncooperative does with their racks aggressively before, and they always win.

kingzfan2000

From an evolutionary standpoint, starting from no antlers at all, how does one suppose only the males came to have antlers?

premjan

The males who had antlers were able to have their way with females and repel rival males?

Berthold

Besides observation (also male deer defend themselves against predators primarily with their hooves) this is important evidence that the antlers were an instrument for mating rivalry to start with. Big antlers are, by the way, also an honest sign of good genes (ability to take in enough food for the minerals required); these genes are advantageous for the female offspring, too, which needs enhanced mineral supply while bearing the young. The only species of deer I know of in which both sexes have antlers is the reindeer/caribou. They use them to remove snow from vegetation.

kingzfan2000

But antlers would not have been advantageous for mating rivalry from the very beginning. They could have been nothing more than tiny nubs or they would have had to evolve within a few generations to be signifigantly advantageous for mating rivalry. So starting from when no deer had antlers to the mutation that did whatever it did to cause bone to protrude from a deers head, why did only the males develop antler (depending on species)? It would not originally be beneficial to males for mating rivalry because they could not possibly be developed or structured enough from the initial mutation that caused them. Wouldnt it take thousands of years for the antlers to be developed enough to be useful for mating rivalry? Also from a traditional evolutionary standpoint, wouldnt it be more likely that deer would have one antler protruding from its head instead of two? Starting from a regular skull with no protrusions, why would a random mutation cause two irregular but symmetrical bony growths to start protruding from the skull? It seems (to me at least) that one antler would be much more on par with random, unguided evolution. Also, wouldnt you need a different mutation for each stage of development of the antlers?

Berthold

What if the males originally just shoved with their heads, and the antlers started as bumps? In the middle of the skull there is a suture, and structures tend to come in pairs anyway. The unicorn is as rare as the one-eyed, one- horned, flying purple people eater (by the way, is he purple, or does he eat purple people?).

flintknapper

The antler actually grows out of a thing called a pedicle. Call it the "root" of the antler. The antler falls off every year in late winter, but the pedicle remains in the skull. Perhaps the pedicle is a modified gland like a scent gland, where there were two to begin with and only males had them?

Perhaps deer first had horns like goats, which are made of modified hairs instead of bone, and whose origin went much farther back in the evolutionary tree? With the pedicles already in place, it might have been simply a switch from modified hair to bone.

One thing for sure, antler is the near perfect tool to flake flint into tools. Antler was prized by primitive cultures from earliest times in the US.

premjan

probably deer with more protection would suffer less damage when they banged heads. From there to antlers is more of a smooth succession.

Oolon Colluphid

Which explains why the Designer made it so antlers are shed each year. He was helping out with Adam's flintknapping! And there was me thinking it was rather wasteful...