Bison weight trajectories

Weight trajectories of 16 bison at Konza Prairie. Colors don't mean anything here.

More and more animals are walking over the bison scale. I think because of what watersheds were burned, the bison have just been in other parts of Konza. Only about 80 of the 120 animals that have a tag have walked over it since we installed it about a month ago. We have a lot of other weights, but they most likely are for other animals that didn't get tagged (or ones with a tag that didn't get an EID reading).

Still, we're just now getting enough data to start to see some trajectories of weight gain.

Over the past month, there are the 16 animals that we have enough data for to start to look at weight trajectories...I've scrubbed out the animals with too few data. Data points that are obviously too low/high have also been removed.

The general trajectory since we installed the EID reader on May 1 has been for animals to be gaining weight.

Yearlings are gaining 1.3 kg a day.

2-year olds are gaining 1.6 kg a day.

The two older animals 1.9 kg a day (take with a grain of salt).

2-3 lbs per day is a pretty reasonable number.