Some basic questions about Bigfoot

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Eh... JREFers love to one up on the 'Oh... Oh Yeah?! They HAVE been spotted in Hawaii!! LINK LINK LINK' and pig thievery rather than answer your intriguing questions.

Intriguing in the same way asking about unicorns in my back yard is.

There's plenty of wild mushrooms and berries. Not to mention salmon and trout in the rivers and the odd dead deer.

We've seen this kind of handwaving before where you haven't actually said anything of substance, like surplus caloric value per acre available to a completely new species added on to the existing animal population.

You might just as well add all the food at grocery stores and people's refrigerators, as if there wasn't already people consuming them. Have you heard of steady-state equilibrium or carrying capacity?

You have to address the fact that existing animal populations are counted by professional wildlife managers, with seasons and bag limits for big game or fish established with recognition of the carrying capacity of the land & waters, reproduction cycles, hunter success rates, etc.

And they not only establish how many animals and fish we can catch and kill, but exactly what sex and size. No trout below a certain size, only bull moose with spike fork or over 50" antlers, etc. These management units are small, like individual drainages too.

So this is a gross argument from ignorance. Because it works from the presumption that nobody knows how many animals there are, what the carrying capacity of the land is, what the sustained yield is, etc. when in fact this is known in tremendous detail with profesionals working on it every day in fish/game departments, university studies, professional journals, etc.

It's no different from looking out on a rancher's pasture and saying "oh. look at all the grass - it's easy to see how a population of invisible buffalo could survive on this field." Except for the fact the farmer already has cattle grazing on the field or else he mows the hay and stores it in the barn.

Likewise you can't say "oh look how there are fish in the streams" and then postulate a population of invisible bigfoot eating them. For example, the summer run of chinook salmon on the Columbia was between 20,000-40,000 fish for a quarter century beginning in the mid 1970's.

You just go ahead and explain to me now how many of those closely watched salmon, counted at each dam they pass, all the way to spawning beds - are eaten by bigfoot. Are they eating the hatchery runs or the wild runs? Why is no fisheries biologist aware of this loss?

You have to do more than just say "there are fish in the river" to hypothesize an entire population of some predator species, let alone an imaginary one, is sustaining itself upon them.

 

[StankApe]

damn ABP, you brought the thunder on that post!

 

[Sonny2]

Interesting post, ABP. More and more people live in an urban settings anymore and have no idea of what you're talking about. It becomes all too apparent when they talk about BF.

 

[Travis]

Well the food issue was always what got me. Bears are omnivores and yet they often find themselves coming into contact with people in their search for food. The idea that we can drop down an 8 foot mammal into those same woods and have it somehow forage for food more effectively than even the bears just seemed unlikely.

 

[StankApe]

One of them would have gotten hit by a car, stumbled into town with brain damage, been shot by some hillbilly...something, if they really existed. You don't have a breeding population of large mammals out there and have it not come into contact with humans . It's frankly, implausible.

 

[RedRatSnake]

Well the food issue was always what got me. Bears are omnivores and yet they often find themselves coming into contact with people in their search for food. The idea that we can drop down an 8 foot mammal into those same woods and have it somehow forage for food more effectively than even the bears just seemed unlikely.

Given the intelligence that BF is pegged with I can see it doing a decent job of hiding but at some point it would have been bagged and tagged long ago, BF is said to be 8' tall and 500 pounds give or take, do you think it would hide in the bushes waiting for a bagel ? it would need to eat what it could get and like any animal even a pet dog, put meat or just about any food in front of it, get in it's way and your going to get bit or worse. Bigfoot would be leaving evidence of it's presents but it don't seem to do that, not even one of them, like they are all breed to be perfect and never trip up at all.

This whole BF thing is based on continual lies and shifting of facts to fit what ever situation comes up.

 

[Sonny2]

It's an interesting study to me of how people can believe in something so implausible with no evidence. The power of the irrational over the rational, a sort of sociological study in willfull blindness. It has strong religious overtones, the same kind of thinking - or non-thinking - and I find it interesting that so many Footers are religious, according to that sociological study done a couple of years back. They're not necessarily stupid, though it does attract some off the deep end, but irrational in the true sense of the word.

 

[RedRatSnake]

It's an interesting study to me of how people can believe in something so implausible with no evidence. The power of the irrational over the rational, a sort of sociological study in willfull blindness. It has strong religious overtones, the same kind of thinking - or non-thinking - and I find it interesting that so many Footers are religious, according to that sociological study done a couple of years back. They're not necessarily stupid, though it does attract some off the deep end, but irrational in the true sense of the word.

Coming soon to a location in "Texas" ( Not Affiliated With The United States) ~ The TRBC Commune For The killing & Preservation Of Sasquatch ~

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

damn ABP, you brought the thunder on that post!

And it isn't even complete. Because people also throw out these seasonal resources that are first of all concentrated in very small areas at known times and secondly are at great distances from one another.

If it is a salmon run then you've placed the bigfoot in the water fishing as the run comes in, just like the bears, and that's exactly when fishermen will be there too. If you are throwing out coastal resources as Binglebutt has then he is out on the beach. If he is eating berries on the edges of the mountain meadows too, then explain how bigfoot migrated across the highways, through the towns, over fields - as family units - without being seen.

For real animals that have seasonal resources like that you have well known migration routes, like the hunters waiting on the elk migrations. The bigfoot would have been doing this for the last thousand generations and everyone would know about it.

 

[Sonny2]

Well, these are MODERN BF, they just hide in people's toolsheds and eat garbage and beg bluberry bagels.

 

[The Shrike]

I've personally never been impressed by the "food argument" from the skeptics' side. ABP is mostly right, but I think his assessment assumes a lot of knowledge that we can know but very often do not know.

For example, the Lozier et al. paper from a few years ago used ecological niche modelling of bigfoot print locations to determine a highly significant level of niche overlap between alleged bigfoots and black bears in WA, OR, and CA. Such a level of niche overlap should not be, according to the principle of competitive exclusion - a firm foundational concept in ecology and evolutionary biology.

The problem, however, is that competitive exclusion only applies where there is competition, and competition only applies where resources are limiting. By limiting, I mean that fitness (lifetime survivorship and reproductive success) is less than it would be (for both parties) if those resources were abundantly available. Many folks interpret competitive exclusion to be "two species can't occupy the same niche indefinitely". A better way to think about it as "two species can't evolve to occupy the same niche." Two species certainly can occupy the "same" (i.e., a broadly overlapping) niche -and probably for decades - provided that population densities are low enough so that resources aren't truly limiting. Even if one of the species was at a distinct disadvantage relative to the other, the affect on a long-lived species could take several generations to manifest itself.

So if bigfoots eat what bears eat, and there are 100 bears for every bigfoot, then no one is going to notice the foraging impact of that low density of bigfoots. It would easily be subsumed within the foraging impact of changing population densities of bears.

Now the error in my thinking about this stuff lies in defining a hypothetical "bigfoot" to fit into such a scenario. I've just described a size, distribution, population density, and niche requirements of bigfoot to make my case - none of which can be determined and some of which are counter to 'footer's claims.

So all musings of bigfoot ultimately boil down to the most obvious and rational approach to the phenomenon - until the day someone can ever demonstrate that there's such a thing as a bigfoot, all speculation about it is little more than mental masturbation.

 

[SuperFly]

And it isn't even complete. Because people also throw out these seasonal resources that are first of all concentrated in very small areas at known times and secondly are at great distances from one another.

If it is a salmon run then you've placed the bigfoot in the water fishing as the run comes in, just like the bears, and that's exactly when fishermen will be there too. If you are throwing out coastal resources as Binglebutt has then he is out on the beach. If he is eating berries on the edges of the mountain meadows too, then explain how bigfoot migrated across the highways, through the towns, over fields - as family units - without being seen.

For real animals that have seasonal resources like that you have well known migration routes, like the hunters waiting on the elk migrations. The bigfoot would have been doing this for the last thousand generations and everyone would know about it.

One scenario for taking advantage of resources such as salmon runs without being detected might be nocturnal feeding, or largely nocturnal feeding. If that is true, then it would avoid detection by most fishermen. On the other hand fishermen have reported sightings of BF during daytime, but of course we can all safely discount those witness accounts by use of circular logic.

 

[Resume]

One scenario for taking advantage of resources such as salmon runs without being detected might be nocturnal feeding, or largely nocturnal feeding. If that is true, then it would avoid detection by most fishermen.

What type of salmon? Kisutch, Gorbushka, Keta, Nerka, Tshawtscha? Where?

Because of course during the runs of a few of these species, "nocturnal" feeding would have an extremely limited window of opportunity, or sometimes no window.

 

[Spektator]

Maybe bigfoots eat bears. That would explain the scarcity of bear remains in the wilderness.

 

[LTC8K6]

Bears would be foraging for salmon at night, and they rarely tolerate competition. Bears don't make much of a shadow on the water at night, making them more successful at salmon grabbing.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

So if bigfoots eat what bears eat, and there are 100 bears for every bigfoot, then no one is going to notice the foraging impact of that low density of bigfoots.

It would easily be subsumed within the foraging impact of changing population densities of bears.

Hi Shrike glad to see us converging on this.

The problem of "just so" explanations is that in isolation they almost seem reasonable. As long as we spend no more than a passing instant thinking about it.

Bigfoot is larger than black bears - like twice the size - yet the wildlife enumerators count bears. We were talking about Washington State so let's just go with that:

http://wdfw.wa.gov/living/bears.html

So over recent years there will be between 25,000 and 30,000 black bears in Washington. On that site they have 21 mammals, and they have population numbers for even the rarest. Cougars are estimated to be between 2,000-2,500 animals. Moose are down around 1,000.

Moose are roughly on the size of bigfoot. But with moose we have a population number and a permit hunt of about 100 animals a year. Golly, why do we have population estimates for this animal and none for bigfoot?

If we went with your 100:1 estimate for bears to bigfoot that gives us 250 to 300 of them running around undiscovered in Washington State. The problem brought on now is that if you don't concentrate them in a very small areas, there is no viable breeding population.

It also does not solve the problem of needing to migrate them from the salmon streams to the intertidal areas to the mountain meadows. The bigfoot that solves more than one problem at once quickly becomes a cartoon.

 

[Mark F]

I don't really follow the Bigfoot threads so pardon me if some of these are redundant.

A Squatch (don't blame me, I didn't come up with that name) would appear to me to need upwards of 4000 calories a day to support their enormous bulk. What are they hypothesized to eat?

Beef Jerky apparently (he said, shocked that no one beat him to it).

Are they hypothesized to live in pods/herds/clans, as monogamous couples or as independents?

Yes.

How is it that they are both so rare as to be unconfirmed as an existing species but so common that they are reported in all the states excluding Hawaii?

They only live in blurry, hazy, out-of-focus places.

Has anyone tried to locate them through dung research or aircraft with downward infrared equipment?

What, use science?!?!?!?

I once encountered something in the woods that let off one hell of a loud roar of a type that I had never heard before. I've always just assumed it was an existing and known animal making noises in an unfamiliar way. But someone else might have interpreted it as a Bigfoot encounter. Wouldn't it be logical to just explain away most sightings like this?

I hardly see what logic has to do with any of this.

 

[RedRatSnake]

What, use science?!?!?!?

Scientist's have been looking / Searching for Bigfoot several decades now ! They have found nothing...

 

[Sonny2]

Well, the footers would argue elsewise, saying that science has willfully disregarded BF and all the evidence. I think they forget that biologists and natural resource specialists are scientists.

 

[Travis]

What about fossils?

We have no fossil record of a large primate in North America prior to Homo Sapiens am I correct?