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spiderfarmer t1_iu4glei wrote

Reply to comment by pds314 in Is it possible that only 4 moose imported to Newfoundland in 1904 could produce a viable modern population of 110,000 today? by SlipCritical9595

Why would a moose do that though?

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DomovoiP t1_iu4kjmi wrote

Moose likes yummy seaweed, swims out some distance to eat some. Crazy current drags the moose out to sea, it gets disoriented. Moose then swims until it Finds a New Land.

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jumpmanzero t1_iu4mqno wrote

And two of them, with a length of seaweed between them, could absolutely bring along a coconut.

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Isotope_Soap t1_iu4t36c wrote

Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?

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herbdoc2012 t1_iu4uzeq wrote

On the backs of small parrots flying between the fjiords is how coconuts migrate as we all know that!

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DragonBank t1_iu5a683 wrote

The hard part is a female and male both doing this in a period they can viably reproduce and meeting eachother on the islands. I'd assume 100s of moose would need to attempt this before a population occurs.

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PacoTaco321 t1_iu5zfwk wrote

It is a low probability of happening, but species spreading to a completely different part of the world from floating thousands of miles across an ocean and having a viable population in that new area also happened a lot more often than you'd probably think, so two moose swimming on their own 18 km is not too much of a stretch.

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mdielmann t1_iu63iv0 wrote

If a small population was already there, say, introduced by people, every moose that migrated there would be a breeding candidate.

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Ihavebadreddit t1_iu4zofr wrote

A deer swam from NB to PEI recently. 12.9 km roughly

Only to be hit by a truck once it reached the island.

There are no deer in PEI

Well.. there was 1 for a few hours.

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mattdjamieson t1_iu6v1ec wrote

It’s true they send people over Confederation bridge to make sure no deer are sneaking over on the highway. Lol

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GuanoLoopy t1_iu4k3ei wrote

It's not like they are thinking, 'hey let's go for a long swim', but they do go into water to eat and swim and if they got turned around or a current brought them away from land or a storm came upon them, they have no choice but to keep swimming. So some very small percentage could stumble upon it that way. All you need are a couple (or 4) to get a population started, and if some new moose got added to the genepool via a water crossing that would help a genetically bottlenecked population tremendously.

And at first glance 110K from 4 moose seems like a rather large population boom. But they can produce 1-2 offspring per year, so not accounting for deaths and a best case scenario that can grow rather quickly, and if you can sustain 110K moose there are way more resources available than needed for a much smaller population so resource constraints wouldn't be a problem at least. A few decades and some luck is all they needed.

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BigZombieKing t1_iu599d5 wrote

In the rut, a bull moose will come from that distance or more to the call of a cow moose. Plowing through the thickest bush, swimming through anything and just generally ignoring the terrain.

Once there were cow moose across the water, I think bull moose crossing would be inevitable.

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