If My Math Is Correct (Sasquatch/square Mileage)

[MarkGlasgow]

If they are that spread out, how can they even sustain a mating population?

This is an very good question. Given the huge swathes of sightings, BF is either very mobile or a lot more prevalent than we think.

Edited May 24, 2013 by MarkGlasgow

[MarkGlasgow]

If they are that spread out, how can they even sustain a mating population?

This is an very question. Given the huge swathes of sightings, BF is either very mobile or a lot more prevalent than we think.

[Guest DWA]

I go with" a lot more prevalent".

So does John Green.

Too many people seem to want to explain "why no one sees them.". Seems to me that many people are.

[Guest openminded skeptic]

What I am wondering is how many square miles is required to support one animal the size of a sasquatch if it is a) a herbivore or [] an omnivore?  And how does that compare to the square miles of forest available to such creatures, and do the square miles of forest divided by the required square miles per creature add up to enough creatures to support a breeding population?

According to my understanding, 10,000 would be more than enough for a breeding population (I have heard 2000 and 300 mentioned as minimum breeding population sizes, I don't know which is true), and 319 square miles sounds like a lot of room (a aquare 17.9 miles on a side).  However, I don't think its as simple as taking all of the forest in N America and dividing it up to determine how much space is available per creature.  For one thing, a look at Google Maps shows the forested areas of N.America, especially in the US, are split up into many separate forested regions that have no forested connections with one another - to get from one to the other the hypothetical sasquatch would have to cross wide areas of open farmland, prarie, desert, wide rivers, whatever.  Each of these isolated areas would have to be large enough to support its own, separate sasquatch population, because those sasquatches are going to be stuck there.

Secondly, I'm not sure what it means to say that N America has 2.045 billion acres of forest.  Does that count every patch of woods that dot the farmlands and suburbs, and aren't big enough to support much of anything besides birds, squirrels, and racoons? How big does a patch of woods have to be to be counted as part of the N American forest lands?

By the way, If you want to have fun, zoom into a reported bigfoot stomping ground and see how well connected the forest there is with other forests nearby.  Is it part of a big conintuous forest or just a large isolated patch of woods that nothing could walk out of without being seen stomping across farms, suburbs, and major highways?  Or is it connected with other forested areas through greenways that might allow a hairy biped to slip back and forth through the surrounding farmlands or grasslands to a bigger forest without being seen?
 

[AaronD]

Keep in mind that few if any reports are believed by most (if any) people the witness knows; keep in mind as well that for any phenomenon like this, reports are in all likelihood a very small percentage of actual encounters.

 

 

 

 

I would tend to agree here, in fact, I've guestimated that about 1% of "sightings" are actual encounters. The rest I would label as hallucinations, mistaken identity, overactive imaginations, attention seeking/exaggerations, and last but not least--all out hoaxing.

[Guest DWA]

Not too likely.

 

One doesn't come up with a guidebook-ready description of an animal - right down to fine features of morphology and behavior generally known only to primate experts - from a random concatenation of all kinds of stuff.

 

Where does the 1% come from?

[AaronD]

It was just a guestimation of mine, based on the number of "reports" out there to ones that seem to be legitimate....again, just a guess on my part. If I'm wrong, I am open to correction; but for now this is what I think.

[Guest JiggyPotamus]

I respectfully disagree with you. Not with your mathematics, but with the estimation of a population of 10,000 individuals. I think this is much too low. I believe that the population suffered a catastophic decrease in individuals starting many hundreds of years ago, but that for the past two-hundred years or so, give or take, the population has been steadily increasing. If I had to guess a number for the individuals present in the sasquatch population in 2013, I would say that there anywhere from 40,000 -- 70,000 individuals. I have raised this number from previous estimates that I have had. At one time I estimated there were about 25,000 individuals present within North America alone, but recently I have concluded that this number is likely too low.

 

So I suppose I would settle on 55,000 as the actual population in 2013. But this is for all of North America, not just the United States. Much of their population is likely present in the wilds of Canada. So maybe we could say that only 35% of the entire North American sasquatch population lives within the borders of the United States. Mathematically that would mean that the US sasquatch population is about 20,000 individuals. But I am not very confident regarding the percentage of animals that live in the US as opposed to Canada. I suspect that a couple of thousand of years ago the sasquatch population was situated more in the present day US than in present day Canada, and that they actually migrated into the more northern areas as time went on. But honestly that will depend on some other things, like "how" they got to North America in the first place, and how long they have been here. If they were here at the time of the last glacial maximum, of course their population would have been more highly concentrated in the southern reaches of North America, since there was a large ice sheet in present day Canada, which extended down along the eastern coast of the United States to somewhere around Ohio...Maybe, lol. I am not quite sure.

 

And to be honest, my numbers are probably off a bit, because I think that 20,000 individuals within the US is still too low. There are probably at least 30,000 individuals within the US. But we must realize that many live in Alaska. So we have to determine whether we are talking about the continental US or not. I am referring to all states of the USA, not just those that are connected. I wonder how many live in Hawaii? Haha. Personally I would be willing to bet that they would prefer more temperate climates as compared to cold and icy locations. So maybe, just maybe, there is a larger population of sasquatch inside the continental US than there is in Canada...? The only aspect of all this information that I am adamant about is that there is a much larger sasquatch population than others believe.

Edited May 25, 2013 by JiggyPotamus

[BobbyO]

It was just a guestimation of mine, based on the number of "reports" out there to ones that seem to be legitimate....again, just a guess on my part. If I'm wrong, I am open to correction; but for now this is what I think.

I respectfully disagree with your guesstimate, especially saving read close to 300 sighting reports in WA state over the past 6 months or so.

There is a very small number of reports in what I've read that screamed " not Sasquatch " to me, and even less in the actual sighting reports ( Class A's ) and I say that as someone who has no issue fighting in his own mind about the existence of these animals in the first place which, when you're of that mindset, you're more understanding of any sighting report anyway as you're not still questioning the animals existence.

There was however a few Class B's which I didn't understand how they could be directly attributed to Sasquatch, but that's another argument entirely.

Plus the 1% is based on absolutely nothing, the human mind is programmed to think and round things off via numbers, especially round numbers like 100 and 1.

[Guest Llawgoch]

The bear number is presumably reasonably accurate at 733,000.

 

You've then guessed 10,000 for sasquatch.

 

All your maths is simply going round in a circle to come back to the ratio of 73:1 between these two numbers.  

 

As this is wholly dependent on a guess of 10,000, any value it has is solely dependent  the accuracy of that guess.

 

You have effectively said "I guess there are 73 times fewer sasquatch than bears, therefore there are 73 times as many bears as saquatch."

Edited May 25, 2013 by Llawgoch

[norseman]

Its at least a 73:1 ratio............my guess its probably a wider gap than that. This is based on sightings and other evidence found and what a rare event it is.

[Guest DWA]

I have said for a long time that public attitudes have much more to do with the perceived elusiveness/rarity of sasquatch than actual sasquatch attributes do.

 

Reports don't have this animal as being significantly more elusive than the ones we know about.  It's just that folks are disinclined to report sightings...and look at all the ones that do get reported.  That tells me there's a bigger population, by far, than two to six thousand.

 

Disiniclination to report sightings isn't just a sasquatch phenomenon.  How many of the animals you have seen in your life have you reported to anyone in authority, or keeping records?  It's just that there's more of a disincentive with something that public opinion says isn't real.  I know of one sasquatch report that came to light by dint of a report to a ranger or wildlife office.  (Many observers have reported; but in this case the report actually led to the filing of the sighting on the BFRO database.)

 

Once saw a file of about 30 bighorn rams crossing the Schoolroom Glacier in Grand Teton NP.  Grazed right up to pebble-toss range.  In camp that night, I asked an NPS ranger:  any bighorns in Grand Teton?  No, was the reply.

[BobbyO]

One thing I will say, you simply can not try to attribute sightings of Bear > Sasquatch and attempt to work off of that as the reporting of a sighting of a Bear > Sasquatch is a WHOLE different ball game.

The potential ridicule, the mainstream taboo, the risk involved of reporting a Sasquatch sighting is so great for so many, that its just not worth it.

Use me asa perfect example.

A Bear on the other and getting reported to a Park Ranger, and all of a sudden you're entering into a 20 minute conversation.

It really is apples and oranges, baseball and football, sharks and gold fishes etc etc.

[Old Dog]

If they are that spread out, how can they even sustain a mating population?

 

The estimate of 1 per 319 sq. mi. doesn't mean there is only one in that area.  You could extrapolate that there may be 6 for every 1914 sq. mi.  A migrating group of 6 could be a basis for a mating population, especially if you factor in a belief that humans started with just two and grew from there.  Then from that band of 6, they split off on their own, otherwise we would be running across herds of Sasquatches roaming the forests.

[Guest SquatchinNY]

There could be thousands of squatches in North Canada that no one sees. Perhaps the US squatch is more used to hiding. What about in the rockies? Doens could live without detection. And Alaska?