Tallest deer, and North America’s second-heaviest lander
Alces alces—the moose, or elk in Eurasian English—is the world’s tallest, largest, and heaviest living deer and the sole surviving Alces species. In North America only the American bison outweighs it among land animals. Browsers of twigs and aquatic plants, they have fed Ice Age hunters and modern peoples alike.
Season flips the menu between land shoots and watery greenery; winter leans on branches, twigs, and dead wood. Wolves, bears, humans, and rarely wolverines take them, especially calves. Hunting and habitat loss have shrunk ranges that once supported Indigenous sustenance across northern continents before early modern centuries.
Names cause confusion: British English calls Alces alces an elk, while North American English uses elk for the wapiti, Cervus canadensis. Greek álkē and Latin alces were probably borrowed from a northern European tongue, and Old English had elch and eolh by the eighth century. Moose entered English by 1606 from Algonquian languages, echoing Narragansett moos and Eastern Abenaki mos, perhaps from a word meaning he strips off.
An adult stands 1.4 to 2.1 metres at the shoulder, more than 30 centimetres above the wapiti, the next-largest deer, while its tail, only 6 to 8 centimetres, is too short to swat insects. Bulls grow antlers whose size and symmetry signal health and may sway a cow's choice; North American antlers usually have two butterfly-like lobes per side, while Eurasian ones look more like a single seashell lobe. Mature Alaskan bulls can exceed a 2-metre spread, and the widest recorded reached 2.1 metres.
Bulls shed their antlers after the rut to save energy for winter and regrow them in three to five months each spring, making antlers among the fastest-growing animal organs. A castrated bull drops his set within two weeks and then grows a misshapen one he never sheds, and very rarely a cow grows antlers through hormone imbalance. The large muzzle has nostrils that seal shut while the animal feeds on underwater plants.
Source: Moose
