Elk

• 1. Introduction

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  Elk, known to science as Cervus canadensis, stand as the second largest member of the deer family. A mature bull can weigh close to 500 kg, carry antlers that alone tip the scales at 18 kg, and unleash a bugling call that reaches a frequency of 4000 Hz. That call cuts across mountain valleys, announcing the animal's fitness to rivals and potential mates alike. What makes this creature so difficult to simply name, let alone fully understand? Early English colonists borrowed the word "elk" from their home language, where it had long described the European moose, and pasted it onto a different animal entirely. The Shawnee and Cree had their own word already: wapiti, meaning "white rump". These two names, one borrowed, one Indigenous, have coexisted uneasily ever since. Behind the naming confusion lies a deeper question about what the elk actually is, where it came from, how it behaves, and why it has moved from one continent to another with such disruptive ease.

• 2. A Name Contested

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  Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1584 in his Discourse Concerning Western Planting, described North America as a land full of many beasts, including what he called "redd dere". He was looking at Cervus canadensis and reaching for the nearest European label. John Smith's 1616 A Description of New England did the same. Sir William Talbot's 1672 English translation of John Lederer's Latin Discoveries called the animal "red deer" too, but added a pointed parenthetical: the creatures were, it said, "for their unusual largeness improperly termed Elks by ignorant people". Thomas Jefferson used "red deer" in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, and David Bailie Warden repeated the choice in his 1816 Statistical, Political, and Historical Account of the United States. The Oxford English Dictionary, never one to sidestep difficulty, describes the etymology of the word elk as "of obscure history". The trail runs back through Middle English forms such as elcke and elke to the Old English elch, and from there to the Proto-Germanic elho- or elhon-. By the 17th century, the original referent, the European moose, had already been extirpated from the British Isles for so long that "elk" had softened into a vague synonym for "large deer". Into that semantic vacuum stepped Cervus canadensis, arriving just in time to be misnamed by a generation of colonists.

• 3. Splitting the Species

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  For most of modern biological history, elk and European red deer were filed under the same species, Cervus elaphus. That classification held until mitochondrial DNA studies, beginning in 1998, began chipping away at it. A larger study conducted in 2004 examined hundreds of samples drawn from red deer and elk subspecies across the Cervus family and concluded that elk warranted their own species designation: Cervus canadensis. The genetic evidence also reshuffled the family tree in unexpected ways. Elk turned out to be more closely related to Thorold's deer (C. albirostris) and even to sika deer (C. nippon) than to the red deer they superficially resemble. Two physical markers separate C. canadensis from C. elaphus reliably: a wider rump patch and paler-hued antlers. The boundary between the species remains porous in at least one place. In New Zealand's Fiordland National Park, elk and red deer have interbred freely, and the hybridization there has been so thorough that virtually all pure elk blood has vanished from that area. Meanwhile, the Chinese forms, including the Sichuan deer, the Kansu red deer, and the Tibetan red deer, sit in their own contested space; some researchers group them as subspecies of C. canadensis while others treat them as a distinct species, the Central Asian red deer (Cervus hanglu), which also includes the Kashmir stag.

• 4. Antlers, Bugling, and the Rut

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  Antler bone can grow at a rate of 2.5 cm per day. While the antlers are forming, a layer of highly vascularized skin called velvet covers and feeds them. Bull elk typically carry around six tines on each antler, and Roosevelt bull antlers can reach 18 kg. The Siberian and North American elk grow the largest antlers; the Altai wapiti carries the smallest. Testosterone drives both the formation and the shedding of antlers. When testosterone levels drop in late winter and early spring, the antlers fall away. The rut may begin as early as late August. During that window, bulls issue their bugle, a sound produced by blowing air from the glottis through the nasal cavities rather than through the larynx. The resulting call can reach 4000 Hz, unusual for a large animal. Elk can also produce deeper calls, around 150 Hz, using the larynx. Bulls that cannot intimidate rivals through posturing and noise will resort to antler-wrestling, and such contests can leave serious injuries on both animals. A dominant bull will defend a harem of 20 or more cows, digging wallows in which he urinates and rolls. The urine soaks into his hair, giving off a smell that attracts cows. The female estrus cycle lasts only a day or two. Younger, less dominant bulls, called spike bulls because their antlers have not yet forked, will harass unguarded cows without performing courtship rituals. Dominant bulls are intolerant of spike bulls and will chase them away.

• 5. Ranges and Migration

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  Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem elk herds can number as many as 40,000 individuals. In spring and fall, these animals undertake the longest elk migration in the continental United States, traveling as much as 168 miles between their summer and winter ranges. The Teton herd alone contains between 9,000 and 13,000 elk; it winters on the National Elk Refuge after migrating south from the southern portions of Yellowstone National Park and west from the Shoshone and Bridger-Teton National Forests. Before European colonization, an estimated 10 million elk lived across North America. As of 2014, that figure sat at around one million. Reintroductions have been slowly rebuilding some of what was lost. Michigan lost its elk in 1875 and received a reintroduction in 1918. Pennsylvania began accepting Rocky Mountain elk in 1913, and a stable population of approximately 1,400 now lives there. In 2016, a male elk, likely from the Smoky Mountains population in western North Carolina, was sighted in South Carolina for the first time in nearly 300 years. Kentucky's elk population had grown to over 15,000 animals by 2022. Prehistoric populations ranged much more widely. Remains have been found as far west as France, and relict populations in southern Sweden and the Alps survived into the early Holocene, around 3,000 years ago. In Yukon, the animal persisted until around 1,400 years before present, which corresponds to roughly 550 AD.

• 6. Disease and Predation

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  At least 53 species of protist and animal parasites have been identified in elk. Parelaphostrongylus tenuis, a nematode that affects brain and spinal cord tissue, can be fatally dangerous to elk while causing no harm to its definitive host, the white-tailed deer. Elk pick up the intermediate hosts, snails and slugs, accidentally while grazing. Chronic wasting disease, caused by a misfolded protein called a prion, was first documented in the late 1960s in mule deer and has since spread to elk across North America. Infected animals show weight loss, behavioral changes, increased thirst, excessive salivation and urination, and difficulty swallowing. In 2002, South Korea banned importation of elk antler velvet specifically because of chronic wasting disease concerns. Brucellosis, a bacterial disease, persists in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the only location in the United States where it still exists among wildlife, though its reach can extend to the Bighorn Mountains. Elk have transmitted the disease to horses in Wyoming and cattle in Idaho. Research toward a vaccine has been ongoing since 2002 without a successful result. Wolves, coyotes, brown and black bears, cougars, and Siberian tigers all prey on elk. In Greater Yellowstone, bears are the primary predators of calves, while healthy bulls have never been recorded as bear kills. Bulls grow more vulnerable to wolf predation in late winter, after months of fighting and herding have depleted their reserves. A recent necropsy study of captive elk in Pennsylvania found that gastrointestinal parasites or bacterial infections caused death in 33 of 65 cases examined.

• 7. Cultural and Commercial Life

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  Neolithic petroglyphs from Asia show antler-less female elk, which researchers have interpreted as symbols of life and sustenance; some images overlay the elk with boats and rivers, reading them as signs of paths to the underworld. The Ancestral Puebloans of the southwestern United States carved elk petroglyphs into cliffs hundreds of years ago. For the Lakota, the male elk's ability to attract mates made it a spiritual model; Lakota men played a courting flute that imitated the elk's bugle, and antlers were used as love charms. The Rocky Mountain elk is the official state animal of Utah, and an elk appears on the state seal and flag of Michigan. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the fraternal organization, took its name from the animal, and jewel-encrusted, gold-mounted elk teeth are prized possessions of many of its members. On the commercial side, elk meat is leaner and higher in protein than beef, pork, or chicken, and is available as a specialty item in some restaurants and grocery stores. A male elk can produce 10 to 11 kg of antler velvet annually. Ranches in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand harvest and sell it to East Asian markets, where it is used in traditional medicine. Since 1967, Boy Scouts of America members have helped employees at the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming collect shed antlers each winter. In 2010, 2,520 kg of antlers were auctioned, raising over $46,000, with 80 percent of proceeds returned to the refuge. The risk of velvet from animals infected with chronic wasting disease potentially causing variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans has added a layer of caution to the trade.

• 8. Invasive Footprint

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  Eighteen American wapiti were released in George Sound in New Zealand's Fiordland National Park in 1905. The New Zealand American Fiordland Expedition of 1949 was organized to study their descendants. Those descendants have since hybridized extensively with European red deer, and the elk have altered forest regeneration in the park by favoring more palatable plant species, which are then replaced by plants the elk find less appealing. The long-term result will be a shift in the types of trees and plants found there, with knock-on effects for the animal and plant species that depend on them. In South America, elk and red deer were introduced to Argentina in the early 20th century and are now considered invasive, competing directly with the indigenous Chilean huemul and other herbivores. The IUCN has named the elk one of the world's 100 worst invaders as a result. Yet the same adaptability that makes the elk a threat in Argentina and New Zealand has also made reintroduction viable across much of its former North American range. In 2015, elk were introduced to the Alaskan islands of Etolin and Afognak, and the largest Roosevelt elk males transplanted to Alaska are estimated to reach up to 600 kg.