Moose Are Bigger Than You Think. And Faster…

Most people who have not stood next to a moose have a fundamentally incorrect mental image of the animal. Bull Moose is the largest member of the deer family, with adult males reaching up to 2.1 meters at the shoulder and weighing up to 700 kilograms. The antlers alone can span 1.8 meters and weigh 20 kilograms. A moose is not a large deer. It is closer in scale to a horse, and it moves with a speed that its bulk does not suggest.

A moose can run at 56 kilometers per hour over short distances and maintain 32 kilometers per hour for extended periods. It can swim at 9.5 kilometers per hour and has been documented swimming distances of over 20 kilometers. In winter, it walks through snow that would immobilize most other large mammals, its long legs lifting its body clear of the surface with each stride.

Moose’s relationship with water is more intimate than most people realize. In summer, moose wade into lakes and rivers to feed on aquatic vegetation, submerging their heads completely and sometimes diving to reach plants on the bottom. They can hold their breath for up to a minute underwater. The aquatic feeding provides sodium that is scarce in terrestrial vegetation, and moose in some areas spend several hours per day in water during summer months.

The Nose

The moose’s nose is one of the more unusual structures in the mammal world. It is large, bulbous, and highly mobile, with a complex internal structure of nasal passages that warms and humidifies cold air before it reaches the lungs, a critical adaptation for an animal that lives through winters where temperatures drop below minus 40 degrees Celsius.

The nose also contains a high density of olfactory receptors, giving moose a sense of smell that can detect predators and other moose at distances of several kilometers. In the rut, bull moose can detect the scent of a receptive female from extraordinary distances, and they will travel many kilometers to investigate.

Wolves and the Trophic Cascade

The relationship between moose and wolves is one of the most studied predator-prey dynamics in ecology, primarily through the long-running research project on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, where a closed island ecosystem has allowed researchers to track wolf and moose populations continuously since 1958. The Isle Royale study, the longest predator-prey study in the world, has documented how wolf predation shapes moose population dynamics, how moose browsing shapes forest vegetation, and how the removal of wolves through disease and inbreeding allows moose populations to grow to levels that cause significant forest damage.

The study has also documented something unexpected. When wolves kill moose, the carcasses provide food for ravens, foxes, eagles, and a range of scavengers that depend on wolf kills during winter when other food is scarce. The wolves are not just controlling moose numbers. They are subsidizing an entire community of scavengers that could not otherwise survive the winter. Remove the wolves and the scavenger community collapses along with the forest structure.

The animal that is bigger and faster than most people expect, that dives for plants in summer lakes, that has a nose built for minus 40 winters, is also a keystone in an ecological web that extends far beyond the moose itself. The Isle Royale research has been making that case for 65 years. It is one of the clearest demonstrations in ecology that everything is connected to everything else, and that the connections run in directions you would not always predict.

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