It would appear that people writing Articles in Arizona, Should learn How to use a Calculator, They dont have enough fingers to do simple math, However They need to reconsider a Wolf would never eat an entire Elk Per week… These Article writers need to return to school!
The article claims that, “(A) wolf consumes about one elk per week, which means 300 wolves would eat about 15,000 elk per year if they lived only on elk. That amounts to about 30 percent of the existing elk herd in the state.” It attributes this information to Arizona Game and Fish Department Assistant Director Jim de Vos.
#This outrageous claim is eight times too high, requiring Mexican wolves to eat their weight in elk meat (about 50 pounds) every day!
#Before Mexican wolves were first released, I and a team of wildlife biologists, including one from Mr. de Vos’ department, used published science to calculate the daily food consumption of Mexican wolves.
#A generous estimate is about six pounds of prey by the average Mexican wolf per day, or about six elk per year — not 50. And given that wolves are avid scavengers, some of their food died of other causes.
#So, rather than the outrageous claim that 300 Mexican wolves would devour 30 percent of entire elk herd in Arizona every year, the actual effect would likely be less than 4 percent and some of those elk would have died of other causes, like hunter kills that were never found.
#Post-release monitoring has confirmed the accuracy of our estimate.
via Numbers for wolf elk consumption in error | Payson Roundup – Payson, AZ.