Apparent Elk Die-off in New Mexico

[Ben M.]

#6626

As far as I can tell, this news broadcast was from today, 8-29-2013. It appears there has been an unusual die-off of a large number of elk in NM.

KRQE report

This seemed to me like something that should be known here. I don’t know any more about it than what the video has to say.

-Ben

[jmsmithy]

#53158

That’s a shame, though it is nature at work I guess. We had a similar issue here in NJ last year. A few towns reported dozens of dead whitetails around certain streams and rivers where those gnats seem to be more prevalent. Amazing how such tough, wild majestic creatures could succumb so quickly to those little sobs…

[handirifle]

#53174

Kinda like the original movie of the Mars invasion, where nothing we did could stop them but once they caught the common cold, it brought the invasion to a halt.

Natural viruses that seem so minor to some, can be killers of the worst kind.

Still very sad to see.

[Stephen Graf]

#53460

That doesn’t look like a virus die off to me. That looks like a bunch of elk just fell down dead. Very un-natural looking to me.

I hope the biologists do their job and really find out what happened…

[tailfeather]

#53517

Strange. EHD is relatively common here, in fact I killed a buck last year that had survived it, but you don’t normally see mass herds of deer all dead together. Typically, you find them scattered around water as the disease drives them to water sources.

Elk and their herd social structures are different though so who knows. I’ll be interested to hear what they determine.

[Bruce Smithhammer]

#53650

Steve Graf wrote: That doesn’t look like a virus die off to me. That looks like a bunch of elk just fell down dead. Very un-natural looking to me.

That’s what I was thinking too, Steve. It seems very weird for EHD to drop an entire herd together like that.

[Troy Warner]

#54048

Smithhammer wrote: [quote=Steve Graf]That doesn’t look like a virus die off to me. That looks like a bunch of elk just fell down dead. Very un-natural looking to me.

That’s what I was thinking too, Steve. It seems very weird for EHD to drop an entire herd together like that.

Agreed… But we could be wrong.

We had a bad year of EHD here with the white tails and we never found more than one animal dead at a time near a water source. The game and fish said that even if animals are infected at the same time that it was highly unlikely that they would die at the same time, but could die within a few hours of each other, and would still most likely be separated by a short distance so it wouldn’t appear as though they died together.

[scotty95]

#54223

what a bummer 🙁

[handirifle]

#54299

Wonder if someone or something poisoned a water source, that they all drank from?

[Stephen Graf]

#54635

If I were to speculate, I would say it looks like they died from exposure to a gas cloud of some kind. This happens from time to time when a volcanic lake turns over and releases a huge cloud of CO2, for example. Or If a tanker of Liquid Nitrogen Crashes on the Highway…

No idea what would cause a gas cloud in that area, but that’s what it looks like to me.

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