I do not agree or disagree with the harvest data. I have not lookedit up. It sounds reasonable, but the predation data does not...80% of the mortalityrate is very high. It sounds like they have some major bias in their assessment. They may be counting carcasses from winter kill/other causes that have been scavenged as due to a predator.
The predatornumbers will usually follow the trends of the prey species and go up and down correspondingly a year or 2 behind the prey populations.
Sweden probably let their moose population get a little out of hand so they're scrambling to get it under control before irreversible damage is done to their forests, plus the subspecies they have tends to be quite a bit smaller in size, so the number of moose harvested or population density comparisons are not accurate because they are not weighted for the difference. You see the same concept in animal units (AU's) in livestock management which allows weighted comparisons.
Theoretically, when a natural system has a high mortality, the hunter harvest in the situation is considered to be compensatory. This means that the hunter harvest is not additive because the harvested animals would have 'died anyway'. The harvest rates could likely be higher and still not really have an effect on the population, in my opinion. Since Alaska is not as easily-accessible as Sweden is, that is probably a major factor as well.
ORIGINAL: nethunter
ORIGINAL: USFWC
Where on earth are you getting these predation numbers?
That would be Alaska
Before getting into predation details, can I assume you agree with the harvest numbers?
Then, since Alaska is 4 times the area of Sweden, they should have 2 million moose, and a sustainable human harvest of 600,000 instead of 7,000. Ask yourself, where are the missing 1,860,000 moose in Alaska?
It's pretty simple to count moose tags.
Now, visualize the revenue from 600,000 moose tags at say $100 each. That would be $60,000,000 each year available for game management, just from filled tags, and just from moose!!!