Ologies with Alie Ward - Ursinology Part 2 (BEARS) with Thea Bechshoft, Lana Ciarniello, Drew Hamilton, Wes Larson, Tsalani Lassiter & Danielle Rivet

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Because one bears is not enough bears, SIX more ursinologists join to answer your questions about polar bear fur, monogamy, that scene from "The Revenant" and more. Five chapters of bear life, from mindblowing mating strategies to how bears get from point A to B, media portrayals of these beautiful beasts and how to save them. Also: do bears want you to sing to them? Bear biologists and conservationists Dr. Thea Bechshoft, Dr. Lana Ciarniello, Drew Hamilton, Wes Larson, Tsalani Lassiter & Danielle Rivet field more of the 500 listener questions and it gets… wild. Follow all of these Ursinologists: Instagram.com/tsalani, https://twitter.com/grizzlygirl87, Instagram.com/drewhh; https://twitter.com/LanaCiarniello, https://twitter.com/biothea, Instagram.com/GrizKid Donations went to: www.friendsofmcneilriver.org, Idaho Black Bear rehab, Northern Lights Wildlife Shelter, Polarbearsinternational.org, Grizzly Bear Foundation More links at www.alieward.com/ologies/Ursinology To become a patron: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, pins, totes, shirts, etc. Follow Ologies on Instagram or Twitter Follow Alie Ward on Instagram or Twitter.com Sound editing by Steven Ray Morris & Jarrett Sleeper Music by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your internet friend who calls herself your dad who said that this second Bears episode was gonna come out as a midweek bonus episode just for funsies and then started putting it together and it's like 37,000 clips from six different additional Ersonologists and I was like, what's even in my skull? Is it just a cauliflower? Because no, that's not possible. So it's coming out as a part two, Alliward. Back with another episode of Allergies about Bears.

Fucking hell, yeah, Bears, man. Part two of Bears. So in episode one of Ersonology, we asked Ersonologist Chris Morgan what bear conventions are like and in this Ersonology part two, you can kind of pretend that you're hanging out around a campfire with a half a dozen human beings who have dedicated their lives to helping and understanding bears. How lucky were we, except for me, who did not know how to put this many interviews together and who almost started crying in a hotel room this week going, what was I thinking?

But it's so fun and it turned out great. Also it's divided into chapters. I'm gonna get to that in a second. But first, thank you to everyone on Patreon at patreon.com slash allergies for all of these questions that we just continue every week to lob at experts and to everyone who reviews and rates allergies because I read every single one of them when I feel like I have made a terrible decision to make a clip show and you remind me to keep going. Such as K. Jackson 0529 who says, a friend played the Scorpion episode on a backpacking

trip and I'm hooked. I went to school for fluvial geomorphology and we are a fun bunch. Just Google parachuting beavers. You're welcome. K. Jackson 0529, I did Google parachuting beavers. I am curious. I do need to hear more about how people toss beavers at a place for science, but bears before beavers.

Let's get into it. Okay. Get ready to meet six more bear experts first, Wes Larson. My pronouns are he, him, Wes Larson, a world renowned ursinologist who has been studying these creatures since 2011. You may have seen him in National Geographic, CNN, Al Jazeera, or on Instagram at Grizzkid, where he tazzles 126,000 wildlife-loving followers with pictures of bears. You'll also meet.

My name is Danielle Rivette and my pronouns are she and her. Danielle Rivette, who studied zoology for her bachelors, researched bear diets for her masters, and is now a PhD candidate at the University of Saskatchewan Monitoring Polar Bear Movement. Also joining us is, my name is Tislani, my pronouns are he, him, celebrated wildlife photographer Tislani Lassiter, who also partnered with Nat Geo to photograph carnivore ecologist Dr. Rao and Grant as she ducked into bear dens and took data and cuddled cubs. And I have been following Tislani on Instagram for a while, and if there is someone who can

tell you the best way to observe a bear, it's this guy. Other people I begged to record voice notes into their phone include, see a back shaft, my pronouns are she, her, Dr. Tia Beckshaft, who studied polar bears for 15 years, taking her all over the Arctic in places like Greenland and Russia. She's also the author of the popular Facebook page, Polar Bear Questions. So yes, she's going to answer yours, my friends. As is Drew Hamilton, my pronouns are he and him, Drew Hamilton, an Alaskan-born bear spotting guide and wildlife photographer who has spent 20 years looking at bears.

He's now based in Alaska and is such a joy when it comes to chatting about these important animals. He also takes incredible pictures. And lastly, my name is Lana Czarniello, the absolutely wonderful Dr. Lana Czarniello, a wildlife consultant, arsonologist, and ardent conservationist who studied human bear interactions for her masters at the University of Calgary and bear habitat selection for her PhD at the University of Alberta. She is amazing and such a champion for the bears.

What a group. Y'all had so many questions that Chris Morgan and I just did not have time to answer. So I sent them off to these great bear folks who recorded them and sent them back and we sliced and diced and put them into chapters for you, starting with chapter one, Bears on Film, to get some reactions from arsonologists to bears in the media. Now there's a total of five chapters in this episode addressing everything from bear locomotion to mating habits, polar bear fur, conservation tactics, itchy butts, pointy bits, campsite protocol, bear bells, singing two bears, singing at bears, and whether or not we should all

move to Antarctica with all the world's bears for one big slumber party. So let's dive in with chapter one, Bears on Film. Hey, oligies listeners, my name is Wes Larson, my pronouns are he, him, and so far in my career I've worked with polar bears, black bears, and sloth bears mostly. Okay, so I figure I'll get into these questions. Chris Brewer asked bears, beets, or Battlestar Galactica, and Kate Stomp said this question right here. Yeah, so we got an office span out there obviously, beets, you know, I can take them

or leave them, Battlestar Galactica never got too into it, I watched a little bit, so I'm definitely going to go with bears. Okay, Ainsley Boran asked, remember that documentary called Grizzly Man? He was on Kodiak Island where the subspecies Kodiak brown bear lives. Did the bears really get used to his presence and not attack? Yeah, I do remember that documentary actually got to speak with the director of that documentary, Werner Herzog, and yeah, it's really great, they did a great job on that. He actually was in Katmai, which is close to Kodiak, it's right across the water from

Kodiak, and as far as whether or not the bears really got used to his presence, they did habituate to his presence, they started just to kind of accept him. Those bears are really well fed, they have lots of salmon streams, they have really good food sources, so they're not very territorial, they're not very aggressive, those are the kind of bears that someone can be in close proximity to them like that. You couldn't do that with an interior grizzly bear, but with those big coastal brown bears, you can. But I mean, after a while one of them ended up deciding to kill and eat him, so after

a while you're going to come across a bear that maybe decides you're a meal or doesn't like you or whatever, it's just a matter of time. I wasn't sure if I was going to leave this story in because it's so sad and tragic, and his methods of bear interaction were certainly controversial. But so many of you asked about Ersonologist's feelings that I wanted to hear straight from at least one on it, so my heart goes out to anyone who has been affected by any perilous bear encounter. We'll talk more about how to keep you and the bears both safe in the episode.

But first, let's meet Danielle and gossip about Bedonks. Hi there, my name is Danielle Rivette, and my pronouns are she and her. I currently work with polar bears in the western Hudson Bay area, specifically near Churchill and in Wapdesk National Park and Manitoba, Canada for my current PhD project at the University of Saskatchewan. But I've also worked with North American brown bears, more commonly known as grizzly bears while I was doing my master's degree at Washington State University. It looks like hope has a very important question, and that is, did you vote in Fat Bear Week,

and if so, which bear was your favorite? Did 747 deserve the victory? Well, I always participate in Fat Bear Week, but for people who don't know, Fat Bear Week is kind of like a March Madness competition for bears that feed on the salmon at Brooks Falls, and it is so much fun to pay attention to you and follow this particular competition. It happens every year, I think for the last seven years, originally organized, I believe, by Mike Fitz, who was a ranger at Katmai for a while, and basically what it is is they take pictures of the bears at the beginning of the season after everybody has just come

out of hibernation, and then they take pictures again at the end of the season when bears have been feeding on the salmon, and they've really been packing on those pounds, and they just look like big bear balloons, and it is the funniest thing in the world. These bears are so fat. I have never seen fatter bears. It's unreal. I guess I've seen some fat bears like Azuz, but this just really blows them out of the water.

It's insane how fat these bears are, but yes, I participate in Fat Bear Week. It's on Twitter and on Facebook. You vote, I believe, by going on Facebook and liking particular photos that are set up in the brackets, depending on who you think is the fattest bear in that particular bracket. And then the one with the most votes advances to the next round. And this past year for 2020, 747 was the winner. I don't know that 747 is my favorite bear for Fat Bear Week. I'm a pretty big fan of Holly, but Holly got knocked out pretty early after, I believe,

the second round for her. She got knocked out by Chunk. And then Chunk was ultimately the bear that went up against 747 at the end of the competition. Whether 747 deserved that victory or not is very debatable. I mean, we all have our favorites, right? I wouldn't have voted for him, but he's a big bear. I believe the rangers said that last year, so 2019, they estimated his weight at 1400 pounds and that they thought he was bigger this past year.

So bigger than 1400 pounds in 2020. That is a massive brown bear. And it's so cool because these bears can only get that fat by being on that salmon stream right there. So it's a really cool ecosystem, super fun and exciting competition to participate in. It's one of the cooler things that you can do on social media. And you can get on those webcams, I believe, on explore.org and see a lot of the same bears that are there at Brooks Falls, eating salmon, sitting in the water and kind of all just

hanging out together, looking for fish and waiting for their bellies to be full and for them to be super fat and ready to go into hibernation. Patron Jane Ennis asked this next one, can you watch that revenant scene without wanting to stay inside forever? Is that a realistic bear attack? I know attacks are very rare, but damn, that was really something else to watch. And to answer it is the wonderful Tislani who you should all follow on Instagram immediately. Just pull it up right now, Tislani T-S-A-L-A-N-I.

My name is Tislani. My pronouns are he, him, and I work with black and grizzly bears in the western United States. The revenant scene, a very realistic bear scene. Just given what we know about bear attacks, given how we've seen bears attack their prey or what they do in fights, I think that that's a very realistic attack. When the character shot the bear with a rifle, the bear got more aggressive. You know, it takes a pretty big rifle, a pretty big shot to take down a bear, and if you're not going to hit it just right, all you're going to do is piss off the bear, and it's

going to do more to try to take you out. The way he shook them side to side, grizzlies definitely do that. We've seen that in the wild, the way they jump up and down on you to crush you or break into things. I think that was a very nice scene. Very scary, but very nice. I really did appreciate it. And I think that scene actually did some good for bears.

I think we'll rely less on Hollywood on real bears that people are training or people are using for Hollywood, and it shows that you can actually get a very realistic bear in like a CGI, so I really appreciated that scene. Just want to stress one thing, it's very important that you educate yourself and your bear wear if you live in a place with bears or if you're visiting a place with bears. The more knowledgeable you are, the more confident you'll be in bear territory. Unless you have to fear as a conservationist, I want to turn people's fear of bears into respect for bears, respect their capabilities, respect the nature, and respect the role that

bears play in our ecosystem. This next question is from Francesca Ortizzi, first-time question asker. If all general bear species fought, which one would win and why? This is a pretty easy one. In general, polar bear is the largest bear species standing at like 10 feet tall. Grizzlies, the big Kodiak grizzlies in Alaska would stand probably 8 or 9 feet. They don't meet too much, but I guess if they were to fight, if you had a big grizzly and a smaller polar bear, maybe the grizzly would win.

But in general, I think the polar bear, this is a pretty easy one. Nothing's going to touch a polar bear. They've got larger paws, they've got sharper teeth, but I don't think a grizzly is going to be able to take one. Okay, but what if there was species on species action that was not fighting? So we have an expert for that. My name is Tia Bekshaft. My pronouns are she, her, and I work with polar bears.

Let's dive into some polar bear questions. Are grizzly bear slash polar bear hybrids real? And if so, is this because of climate change? Well, yes and no. So hybrids have always existed to some extent. But now we are seeing that polar bears in some areas are spending more time on the shore because the sea ice is missing for longer periods of time. And we're also seeing that the grizzlies or the brown bears are moving further north simply

because they can find food for a longer period of time over the year. And so we do see more interactions between the two species and sometimes those interactions end up with a mating and with cubs, hybrid cubs. Stephanie Broch is asked, is it a pissly or a growler? So I mean, really, that's up to you, whichever word you like better, pissly or growler. But unofficially, it's a growler bear if the sire, so that it's if the father is a grizzly bear or brown bear, and it's a pissly bear if the father is a polar bear. So I would say that the hybrids that we know of, they are usually growler bears because

it's usually a polar bear female and then a brown bear male. I really apologize if I'm messing these names up royally, but yeah, I hope it works. Oh, you're doing great. We love you. Now, if this were this American Life episode, I would come in, I would glassy like and say, today on our radio program, we've arrived at Act 2, Act 2, Fuzzy Wuzzy, let's get for real. You remember Tislani. Weird bear fact, black bears are not all black. Most people don't understand this, but they come in various colors, black, brown, golden,

blonde. There's even a bluish tinted black bear. There's even a whitish bear called the spirit bear, which is like shiny white. You can find that up in Canada and British Columbia. So I guess that's kind of a weird bear fact. And most people have no idea that black bears aren't always black. Also here with us is Drew Hamilton, an Alaskan guide and bear spotter who himself has a russet kind of fisherman wilderness beard that appears to get glimmering icy crystals on it in the field. My name is Drew Hamilton. My pronouns are he and him.

And I work with brown bears in Alaska and polar bears in Canada. So before I get into it, I think I need to make the distinction for what is a brown bear? Here in Alaska, it's a geographic designation. So if you boil a brown bear, a grizzly bear, and a Kodiak bear, all down to their scientific name, it's Ursus Arctus. And it breaks down geographically. A bear that's found on the coast and has access to salmon is called a brown bear. If that bear is found up in the interior of Alaska, say around Denali National Park,

doesn't have access to salmon, it's called a grizzly bear. And if that bear is on Kodiak Island, well, that's a Kodiak bear. Rebecca Swerida asks, blue polar bears, is that a thing? So sometimes polar bears can be green, but I've never heard of blue polar bears. So polar bears that are kept in captivity in, you know, more humid parts of the world, they can actually get like a green tinge to them, which is a result of algae growing inside of their hair. And yeah, it looks kind of strange, but usually it can be relatively easily cured

by soaking the bears repeatedly in salt water because this kills the algae. I mean, you could consider polar bears blue partially, but that would be their tongue. Sometimes if you see a polar bear tongue, it kind of looks bluish. Polar bears are born with a pink tongue, which after a couple of months starts to become modeled with black. And the tongue of adult polar bears varies in color. Some animals still have a lot of pink showing, some are nearly all or totally black, and some have this mix of pink and black that can actually look bluish.

The roof of a polar bear's mouth and its inside cheeks are also dark in colors. And sometimes you will see pictures of adult polar bears with very blue or even pink tongues and cheeks. These are rugs and the inside of the mouth is made of plastic. So not really a real polar bear mouth or tongue. As far as I know, there is no specific ecological reason for polar bear tongues to be modeled this dark color that they often are. And my best guess is that it may be genetically linked to polar bear skin color,

which also goes from being pink to being black over the course of a few months. At the same time, that the tongue color is changing. Elisa Froze said, I read about the fact that polar bear hair are not white but transparent, and that their skin is black and I freaked out thinking about it. It's like bears are covered with those fiber optic filaments. Why is it better to have transparent than white hair? Actually, transparent and white hair are basically the same thing, because the color of your hair is determined by how much pigment is in there,

how much melanin is in your hair. And so the more melanin you have, the more pigment you have in your hair, the darker your hair is. Now gray hair, our hair turns gray because we have a gradual loss of this pigment. And so once the hair is completely white, it's because there simply is no more pigment in it. So if your hair is completely white, it's basically the same as polar bear hair. So white hair, transparent hair, same, same. One of the very persistent myths about polar bear hair is that they're completely hollow, which is not entirely the case.

So polar bears have two types of hair. There's the guard hair, the longer ones on top, and then there are the woolen hairs underneath that are more curly and softer and really good at holding in the heat. And both of these types of hair are transparent, so they're without pigment, and they're mostly hollow, but they have this air filled core where it's multiple chambers, one after the other down through the hair strand. And it's because of these properties that polar bear hair scatter

and reflect all visible lengths of light, and that makes them appear white to the human eye. Now with regard to the skin, polar bears are actually born with pink skin. But after a couple of months, while they're in the den with their mom, the cup skin turns permanently black. And you can see this on the bear's nose, on its lips, and under the footpaths. And there are quite a few theories that have been suggested over the years as to why this is, but the prevailing one is that the skin is black in order to absorb a maximum of heat from the sun, but also to aid in protecting the animal against UV radiation.

Because generally speaking, darker skin, or rather higher levels of the pigment melanin in the skin, have been found to provide better protection against the sun's UV rays. And this just goes for a wide range of organisms from humans to blue whales. So whichever is true, no albino bears have been reported to date, which could indicate the importance of having black skin in this species. Catherine's girlfriend wants to know what polar bears smell like. I actually wondered the same myself for years, and so the first time I was close to sedated polar bear,

I buried my face in its fur to take a good whiff. And I can tell you that unlike, for example, dogs and cats and horses and sheep, the smell of polar bear is incredibly subtle. If I were to compare it to anything, I think it would be, imagine you've been going for a long walk along the ocean side on a really windy day. So the smell of your clean, non-perfumed, windblown hair when you come back inside is kind of the closest I can come to what it smelled like. There are a number of reasons why polar bears don't have a very strong smell.

First of all, most polar bears spend their entire lives on the sea ice, which is a very neutral smelling environment with water and ice and snow. But also, and this is actually quite important, polar bears don't have territories to defend like most other carnivores do, and so polar bears don't need this strong scent to mark their particular area. Also, all of this being said, I am sure that a wet polar bear will likely have a slightly more noticeable smell than a dry bear, and a polar bear that's in the middle of eating a seal will smell strongly of the prey,

so of the seal's fat and blood. Also, a bear that is forced to spend its summer on land instead of on the sea ice may smell somewhat of wet peat, berries, fermented algae. I also imagine that a polar bear with an upset stomach or an adult female who has spent the past three months in the den with her newborn cubs may well have a somewhat stronger smell. We've arrived at chapter three, bear behavior. How do bears bear to other bears? You all cared and asked a lot of questions, and we have answers. Well, one incredible ursinologist with over 25 years of experience by the name of Dr. Lana Charnello does.

My name is Lana Charnello, and I primarily am working right now with grizzly bears, but I also work with black bears. I am also the co-chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Bear Specialist Group's Human Bear Conflict Expert Team, and in that role, I work with seven of the eight bear species worldwide. So all species accept polar bears because they have their own expert team. So Tammy asked, have we been able to recognize or identify a language in bears? So the answer to that question is absolutely bears have a language. Bear language is more spoken with their body and their movements.

So how they face each other, whether they look each other straight in the eyes, whether they have their head down or their head up, all of those are how bears are talking to each other. So these subtle movements in their body language. Bears also can vocalize, so they will tell you they will clank their jaws and they will tell you things like back off, stay away, get away from me. So not only do they have their body movement language, they can vocalize as well, although that is a bit less common.

They often speak to each other with their body language. Does Wes Larson, aka Grizz Kid, speak bear? He confirmed that their vocalizations can speak volumes. They definitely use a lot of different vocalizations for communication between themselves, between other species. If you, for example, come upon a black bear in the woods and it's not happy with you, it's going to make like a noise or it's going to clack its jaws at you. So they definitely vocalize a lot.

Lana also chimes in about some very on brand bear behavior. So Avery asks, we all know that they're the cutest when they're itching their backs on trees, but the question remains, why are they so itchy? Avery, interesting, you should ask that. This is exactly what I am working on right at this moment, is them scratching their backs on trees. So bears do this for a number of reasons and we believe it is a method of communication between bears.

Sometimes on their way to the tree, you'll see them take their foot pads, put them in a depression and then what's kind of called cowboying. They move them around. Why do they do that? Well, they have scent glands. They have scent glands in their feet and that releases the scent into those marks. Then they will mark all the way up to the tree, the marked tree, and they will either smell up and down that tree or investigate it.

Smelling who's been there, what they've been doing, then sometimes they will stand up or even stay quadrupedal on all four feet and they will itch their shoulder or they will itch their back on that tree. Again, releasing the scents from the glands. Now other bears can use that. It's a method of communication between them. So a female may come up and she might have really young cubs and she can go up to that tree and she will smell up and down

and she may make a decision. Hmm, a big adult male just rubbed on that tree. That big adult male has a possibility of killing these little cubs I have. I'm not going to go that way and she'll turn around and go another way. A paper just came out that talked about it being a dating calling card. So those who are itching on those trees more or scratching the back more may be getting mates from that. So basically it's a method of communication between bears.

But yes, you're right, Avery, it also feels good and gets rid of some of the hair and some of that itch. Ah, we have another question on marked trees and it says, do all bears do the itchy fur dance that we see in those gypses? The answer to that is yes, indeed, all bears do. So some bears may mark more than others and that can be based on if it's the breeding season, if they're these big large adult males, they may be doing more marking.

But absolutely all bears mark trees. I have literally thousands of videos of it going right from our newborn cubs of the year they're called or those bears that have not yet reached their first birthday marking trees all the way up to 1,500 pound males marking trees. All bears mark trees and they're talking to each other pretty much as they do. So they're leaving their calling card. Bearded bear dude, true, echoes that just like me dancing after a few white wines at a wedding, bears can also use their body as an instrument.

They've got impressively complex communication. It's mostly done through body posturing, body positioning. There are some vocalizations involved but really it's very subtle body postures that can tell you exactly what's on a bear's mind. Bella Trezza asked, I heard somewhere that bears grieve for their loved ones. Is this true? And what are the social structures of bear communities? Bears do have emotions. They're probably not as complex

as human emotions. I don't know that I'd be willing to say that bears specifically grieve but they definitely feel lost. They definitely feel attachment. So if you were to boil the different things that make grief, bears can feel those maybe independently but I wouldn't necessarily assign this specific human emotion of grief to something bears do. And as to what are the social structures of bear communities, that is an incredibly complex answer. So it kind of depends on the bears and where they're located.

On the coasts of the Alaska Peninsula, Katmai National Park, McNeill River State Game Sanctuary, you have incredibly high densities of bears and those bears are forced to interact with each other frequently. And so they have actually developed complex social structures that are based on a rank and hierarchy system. And people tend to think that that's based on how big a bear is but it's really based on their attitude. So the alpha bear, the most dominant bear in an area, isn't necessarily the

biggest bear in the area. It's the bear that has the attitude to keep all the other bears in check. Now the family groups will tend to stick together for almost two and a half, three and a half, four and a half years. The cubs will stay with mom. And the independent bears, the kind of teenage males and females that are independent, will sometimes pal around together for a number of years, particularly if they're siblings and grew up with mom together. Though after they leave mom, they'll still

stick around. And then you've got this demographic of large male older bears that are fairly independent. But there are few places where these bears come together to feed. You think of the most famous being Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park or McNeil Falls in McNeil River State Game Sanctuary. And you get to see these amazing interactions between bears. I always say that one day at McNeil River is like a lifetime of studying bears because you can see 40, 50, 60, 70

bears at one time. Most bears I've seen in one stretch of river at McNeil was 78 in a quarter mile stretch of river. And so just sitting there you see all these different behaviors and all these different social interactions just kind of stacked one on top of one another. And so you'll learn real quick. Okay, aside from Bearapalooza, what are smaller group dynamics like? Do bears ever have stepdads? Do they ever call home and see how their mom is doing? Lana has details. Tammy also asked, do bear

families stay together or nearby one another as adults? So that's an interesting question. Okay, for bears the father has no investment in the offspring so he doesn't stay around at all. But for the mother absolutely she raises her young and then it all depends if those young are male or female. If you're a female you are allowed to have part of your mother's home range. So when we look at the genetics of female bears it acts as a matriarch. We've got your like matriarch in the

in the middle and then that rings out into these females who are their offspring as it goes down through the generations. Males however are made to disperse. The mother will chase off her male offspring when they reach the age of dispersal and she'll make them go away and she'll keep after them. They will stay in that area for a while while they grow up but then as they get older they will disperse quite long distances. So we see this quite a bit when we see bears even coming over to where I live on Vancouver Island in Canada.

People will be shocked but it's not shocking at all. Male bears disperse, they go out to look for their own territories and they do this to avoid inbreeding, to not breed with their siblings. So tries to maintain that genetic line. So Ashley asks if it's true that bears have a social structure. Yes it's absolutely true that bears have a social structure. So your big adult males they are your most dominant bears. They get the best feeding spots. They get access to the best females for

breeding. They will fight each other for females for breeding. So there is definitely a social structure that goes from your big dominant males down to your younger just the ones who disperse. They're going to be your most subordinate bears. Let's get PhD candidate and longtime bear fan Danielle back to address some tawdry bear sex gossip. By the way if you have a dick there's a chance it's about the same size as a polar bears or bigger. They have like six inch pickles. Although some research says that it

averages 7.3 inches but I think that the research was done by polar bears. Anyway bear boning since they have an actual bone called abaculum. Let's get into their romantic lives. My next question looks like it's from Megan Bernett Tereshovich. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. But Megan asks what is bear reproduction like and when do they mate? Bear reproduction is one of those topics that's actually super fascinating to me. They're one of the least productive mammals in North America so it takes them a long time to

reach sexual maturity and then to have babies and then for those babies to grow up and then also reach sexual maturity and start breeding on their own. So if you just think about taking like one male and one female bear and say they reach sexual maturity as soon as they can and then they have their own offspring and the offspring survive to do the same it would probably take about 10 years for the population to go from two bears to 15 bears. Very impressive by human standards that would be off the charts but somewhere there's a pair of

rats just laughing their rat asses off at bears because rats could grow a family to half a billion descendants in just three years. So listen to the rodentology episode with Bobby Corrigan for more dazzling rat facts because wow can they make rats? Okay but back to bears. Bears typically are pretty solitary. They're usually only found together when it's a mom with cubs or during the mating season. So average breeding age for these bears is somewhere around

three to five years and just because they've reached sexual maturity doesn't necessarily mean that they're actually going to be breeding that year right? Especially males. Males might be capable of breeding at three or four years of age but they usually don't get the chance to because there's a lot of competition from the bigger older male bears out there and it's the female that kind of chooses what's going on right? He doesn't have a whole lot of say. He just kind of goes around into these

different territories looking for a female that he can breed with but the larger bears typically in the population are the ones that tend to be the most prolific breeders if you will. Bear breeding season usually is in the spring and summer starts in May and usually lasts maybe until early July. Most of the breeding season I would say probably occurs in June for brown and black bears in North America. I believe it might be a little bit earlier for polar bears because at least the polar bears eye research in the western Hudson Bay population,

their breeding season occurs entirely on the ice. So sea ice is really important for polar bears not only because of their access to food but because really important life history events like the breeding season occur on ice. But typically like I said breeding season is in the spring for these bears and males will go around to different territories looking for whatever females they can find. They'll compete with other males for access to those females and it just kind of goes from there I guess. It's like

I've seen copulation in bears before is a little awkward. Kind of looks just like two really big dogs doing what dogs do but you know they breed and then they have their cubs born over the winter during the hibernation period and the cycle starts all over. Merrill Start asked if bears give birth while hibernating. So this is really interesting but yes they actually do give birth while they're in hibernation. Most bear cubs in North America are born typically in January or February while mom is still

in the den for hibernation. And when these cubs are born they're completely helpless, they're blind, they don't have a whole lot of fur but they are furred, they don't really have much going on for teeth in their mouths and they're not really capable of moving around a whole lot on their own. So they are going to depend on mom for almost everything that they need which would include things like getting food. So they're going to have to nurse for mom for the duration of the hibernation period and they actually won't even come out of the

den with mom until sometime in late March or early April. So later in the spring then bears that would be emerging from hibernation without cubs. And mom will usually have anywhere from one to four cubs typically. She could have more but two is usually the most common and those cubs are born really really small. They're like the size of a potato pretty much when they're first born but by the time they're getting ready to go back into hibernation after their first year they can be as much as 80 pounds.

So there's a whole lot of growing that goes on during that first season and it's really really important to remember that even though mom is in hibernation when she's giving birth to these babies she's not actually asleep. So it's not like she just wakes up surprised in the spring and she's like oh no I've got babies that I have to take care of like she's completely aware of what's going on the entire time because she has to take care of them and provide warmth then you know nurse them and things like that. But it's important also to remember

that nursing and lactating is really energetically expensive for these bears and because they're in hibernation they haven't eaten in a long time they haven't had anything to drink and they do have a much lower metabolic rate than they would normally during the active season. Their body temperature drops during hibernation though not quite as much as other animals that hibernate and so they're basically just kind of working off reserves of what they have stored up from the previous year before they went into the din

and so that's what mom is using. She's taking stuff from these fat stores that she's accumulated and putting that into making milk for her babies and taking care of her babies. She just has to be really careful that she's not expending a whole lot of energy so she's still kind of in that hibernation phase but she's not actually asleep while she's giving birth and taking care of her cubs. My next question is from Natalie Ashburner Wright and Natalie wants to know

if there are any kinds of bears that are mostly monogamous? I don't think so. My experience is mainly with blackish brown bears and polar bears all in North America so I'm not entirely sure what would be going on with bears like sun bears or pandas or asiatic black bears or spectacled bears or anything like that but it's my understanding that bears in general are not monogamous at all. Male bears are very promiscuous, they'll find as many females as they can to breed with because the imperative part for them is

to just get out there and get those genes spread out into the gene pool. They want the babies to be theirs so it doesn't really matter to them how many females they breed with but in addition female bears actually have more than one mating partner in a breeding season as well and there could be you know a few different reasons behind that but one of the reasons that I'm most familiar with at least in North America and for brown bears that are in Europe is that there seems to be a pretty high chance sometimes of

larger male bears coming back into territories and killing cubs in order to bring females back into estrus so that they can breed with them again. A female bear won't breed with a male if she still has cubs that are with her and like I said before those cubs typically stay with mom for the first couple years maybe three or four years depending on how clingy they might be or what they might need but males won't breed with females that already have cubs

like females won't they just won't participate so the only way that a male can make that work in his favor is to eliminate the cubs and so what he'll do is he'll come in and he'll kill the cubs and that brings the female back into estrus during the breeding season so that he can mate with her and her next set of cubs will be hiss. Now that doesn't really work super well for maintaining populations and obviously the female wants her cubs to survive as well so what the girls kind of all

figured out to do was to go out and breed with a bunch of different males because males will remember essentially who they've mated with during that particular breeding season and if there's a possibility that those cubs are his he is significantly less likely to come back into that territory later and kill those bears just because it might already be his genes that are there and not somebody else's. So the answer to that question is no I don't know of any bears that are

mostly monogamous I think most species if not all of them are rather promiscuous and they have multiple mating partners within a single breeding season. My next question says whoa please talk about bears reabsorbing embryos is this more common in bears that live in closer contact with humans and that question is from Ira Gray. This is actually one of the most fascinating things about bear reproduction I think this has just completely blown my mind every time I think about it and talk about it but

bears do this really crazy thing that's called delayed implantation and basically what that means is bears will have their breeding season in the spring or earlier in the year so like I said sometime between May and July typically and the embryo will be fertilized but it doesn't actually implant in the uterine lining it just kind of hangs out there I'm not really sure what's going on or like how that actually works but it just hangs out and stays there until it gets a lot closer to when the female starts

thinking about going into hibernation and what happens is females that are at least in brown bears females that don't have at least 20% body fat when they go into hibernation will not reproduce so if the conditions and resources have just been not super great she can't find enough food she's not overly fat when she's getting ready to go into hibernation she'll actually reabsorb that embryo as if it never happened because she knows that she doesn't have enough resources

to provide for any cubs that she would produce during that hibernation period it would actually be super un beneficial for her to have those cubs because she might end up starving herself and she would most likely lose any babies that she would have so in a way females are actually able to decide whether or not they're ready to reproduce whether or not they have enough resources whether or not they're fat enough to support nursing and lactating through an entire hibernation period

is so fascinating to me i don't understand how it works but that's basically what they do so they breed in the spring and they don't actually get pregnant per se until probably november when they go into their den so there's this whole period of time where the embryo is just kind of floating around in there hanging out and then right before they go into hibernation that's when they decide yes i can reproduce or no i can't so either the embryo will be reabsorbed

or it will implant in the uterine lining and when the female actually becomes pregnant that's like i said probably somewhere around november and then she gives birth in january or february so she's actually pregnant for a very short period of time considering whether or not this is more common in bears that live in closer contact with humans i'm not necessarily sure to me it's more of a function of resource availability and whether or not the female thinks that she

has enough fat accumulation so in some circumstances i could see that being beneficial to be closer to humans because some of those bears might be getting into dumps or other anthropogenic food sources maybe feeding on things that they're not supposed to necessarily but they might be fatter bears so maybe in that particular case they'd be less likely to reabsorb an embryo because they have a lot of resources and they're very fat in other circumstances i guess it might be the opposite right if you have a bear

that is close to people and that's stressing them out and they feel like they can't get enough access to resources then reabsorbing that embryo because she's not fat enough when she gets ready to go into hibernation might be the best option for her so i think of it more as a function of resource availability and fatness or like body fat rather than how close the bear is in contact with humans so many cocktail party facts this weird bonus not bonus episode is delivering and will continue to

after a few words about sponsors who are making a possible to donate to not one but six charities this week and west chose the grizzly bear foundation which is dedicated to the long-term welfare of the grizzly bear north america tia chose polar bears international org lana asked that hers go to northern lights wildlife shelter in smithers bc as they are holding the orphaned grizzly bear cubs that she will be releasing this june as part of project rewild and that is wildlife shelter dot com drew hamilton directed his towards friends of mcneilriver

org and danielles is going to idaho black bear rehab and will donate to slani's choice as well there are links to each of those in the show notes and if you are so moved toss a few bucks their way i'm sure they'd appreciate it but if you can't that's okay because we did thanks to these sponsors okay moving right along to locomotor questions chapter four barely getting by let's toss it to true hannah cameron asks i heard bears can't run downhill is this true

bears can run downhill they can run uphill they can run across hills i've seen them scale cliffs that we'd have to be roped up to do safely they kind of have the ultimate four-wheel drive system ronan asks why do bears walk plenty grade are on their heels like humans and is there an evolutionary reason for this well ronan bears actually spend the vast majority of their time walking quadrupedal or on all four feet so they can stand up and they can walk plenty grade now if they were to be walking plenty grade

the main reason for this would likely be a significant injury to one of their front paws so an injury where it's the weight bearing of it would hurts them so it's easier for them to walk plenty grade on their back feet i saw this once in a video with a black bear in town and it did have a significant injury to its front paw and so it was walking like a human so why would they stand on their back legs okay one of the main reasons that they stand on their back legs

is when they are trying to see something or trying to figure out what something is so you'll see them stand up on their back legs and oftentimes with this they may swing their head slightly from side to side and what they're trying to do is catch the scent on the wind so that they can identify what it is they think they saw so for example sometimes when you're hiking if you come across a bear and it's not quite sure what that is you may see it stand on its hind legs and swing its head from side

to side and then you're going to hope that you've taken account of your wind direction and that the wind is blowing in such a direction that it's blowing at the bear and therefore it can catch your scent on the wind and identify you as human Dr. Tia Beckshaft is technically a marine mammal scientist studying polar bears Michael P.S. is asking what makes polar bears such good swimmers are all bears as good at swimming as polar bears and i just don't know it i need answers

thanks so as far as i know all eight bear species can swim though some swim more and longer than others uh polar bears for example they are experts at doggie paddle swimming so they use their front paws to paddle with while their hind legs trail behind them kind of steer them like a rudder and data from satellite colors show that swims of an average of 100 kilometers or 62 miles over three days are not unusual however the most extreme polar bear swim that we know of

was an adult female she swam for nine days straight a total of 687 kilometers or 426 miles which is just mind blowing however swimming is very energetically costly for the polar bears and this swim this incredible swim actually cost this adult female her cub which was with her in the beginning and it also cost her 22 percent of her body fat meaning that although this swim was physically possible for her it was definitely a challenge one of the consequences of climate change

is that the Arctic sea ice gets more scattered more fragmented there was a new paper published recently showing that polar bears now are actually having to spend three to four times more energy than their grandparents did simply because of the changes that we're seeing to their habitat to the sea ice uh which of course also is their essential hunting habitat and so they have to spend more energy to be able to catch seals it's kind of like student loan debt but with your luscious blubber booty getting spent on bullshit that your

elders didn't have to deal with but in this case it wasn't their fault so what do they do do they just completely fuck off and just go live in the sea i would christopher blackington is asking has any research been done on the possibility of polar bears evolving into full-time sea mammals like seals or even cetaceans they spend so much of their time at sea it seems like a natural next step for them so interesting question there is no research on this that i know off uh polar bears are marine mammals it's even in their latin name they're called urses maritimus or the the sea

bear but that being said um they still rely a lot on their fur for heat and fur doesn't really keep you warm underwater there you have to have a good blubber layer instead to keep you warm and also polar bear cubs fare quite poorly in the cold water which is why polar bear mongs will often you know take the long way around on the sea ice so that they can walk on top of the sea ice instead of having to have their cubs swim in the water between ice flows so i don't see it happening anytime soon but you know let's wait a few million

years and see where evolution takes the polar bear Antarctica because that would be like humans moving to a planet literally called no human can live here Hanna Neust asks why aren't there polar bears in Antarctica so to answer this question you need to think about how the different continents have moved around during the different geological time periods and Antarctica has actually been separated from other continents by a vast southern ocean for about 45 million years

which is since before polar bears evolved the family or seedy which polar bears are a part of didn't show up evolutionarily until about 30 million years ago so even if they wanted polar bears just couldn't really get to the end Arctic even if they wanted to the end Arctic is simply just too far away for polar bears they are excellent swimmers but they would struggle to migrate all the way to the south pool it's too far she doesn't see it happening now speaking of seeing actually while a spectacle bear

is one species of South American cloud forest dwelling bear should all bears be spectacle bears Drew will field this one Ainsley Boran asks can they not see well do bears need glasses bears see about as well as we do there's a lot of people will tell you they don't see well but it's not that their eyesight is poor it's that they it's not their most dominant sense they are they're following their sense of smell their sense of smell is so much better than ours that they rely on that more than their

vision that being said I do know a couple bears that squint a lot and probably could use a a set of glasses or maybe some contact lenses to make it easier to catch fish and Fritz asked I've read that bears black bears in the study I read about have some form of color vision do we know much about how they see and how about differences in their ability to see color based on species from everything I've read yes bears do see color it's probably not quite the spectrum we see but some diminished version of that

one study in particular looked at polar bears vision and determined that they were missing a portion of the green spectrum which always begs the question they have the the best seat in the house for the northern lights which oftentimes will appear green to humans so I always wonder what the northern lights look like to polar bears by the by truce instagram is linked on my website too and his photos of the northern lights are bonkers so do follow him

he's a drew hh now what about a bear following you tia addresses polar rumors possible flimflim jesse hurl bird is asking do polar bears really hunt people so not really no sea ice loss has led to an increase in polar bear sightings in northern coastal communities around the Arctic and even though polar bears sometimes will enter human settlements out of curiosity the main reason they do so is hunger because without a healthy sea ice platform that they can hunt seals from

polar bears will start looking for food in other places and quite often this is to their own detriment so we are expecting human polar bear encounters to increase as more polar bears are forced to spend longer periods of time on shore and as human activities increase which of course is both in response to longer ice free seasons all of that being said um polar bears don't really hunt people it's a persistent myth but there is very little reality in it

now if you come across a bear that is hungry or if you somehow manage to surprise it or if you come between a mom uh and her cubs that's not a good situation to be in however i think the main issue here is that polar bears really are not afraid of very much they're very opportunistic they're very curious and if there's something that looks interesting they are very likely to want to investigate and here the problem is that even if they're just

investigating a person that they come across humans are fairly small and squishy and polar bears are very big and have quite a few pointy bits quite a few pointy bits Anna Dilekta is asking so if attacked by a black bear they say you should fight back if attacked by a brown bear or a gristly you should play dead what about polar bears well i mean if you're attacked you should definitely fight with everything that you have for sure there is no point to playing dead

because yeah polar bears don't mind you know sinking their teeth into carcasses for example if there's a whale carcass that washed up on a beach um but of course the best way to avoid polar bear attacks is to be very mindful of your surroundings when you're in polar bear country and so always have a polar bear guard always have a look out when you're in polar bear country that way you're not surprising a bear and a bear is not surprising you

and everyone is all the happier for it so bears they do not like surprise parties for all of us who love being out in nature and also want to do right by the bears because they deserve it Lana chimes in with more advice okay so Hannah asks a tax aside what are the best ways to prevent a bear encounter so Hannah this is really kind of dependent on whether you're going to go in camping or whether you're hiking or whether you're asking me about what are the best ways to prevent an encounter around your home like removing your bird feeder

so i'm going to answer it like you're going hiking so one of the best ways to prevent a bear encounter is first know where you're going what time of year you're going there and where you're most likely going to encounter that bear so if you're going to hike for example in berry season through a berry patch that might not be the best way to go so you want to avoid their critical habitats or avoid places where those bears are most likely to be another way we can prevent encounters is to really be aware of our surroundings

so rather than unplugging and plugging in things like earbuds and listening to music you want to have your ears open have your eyes open have your nose open so you want to make sure there's no really bad smells like a dead animal somewhere that might be attracting a bear or you want to make sure that you're looking all around you and know what's going on is there any bear sign is there scat do you see scat is bear poop by the way that's what we call it is there scat on the trail do you see a bunch of birds that could indicate

maybe a carcass ahead those kind of things then when we're hiking ourselves you asked us singing loudly work absolutely I highly recommend using your voice your voice identifies you as humans and the vast majority of bears know humans and human beings so singing loudly definitely works clapping your hands absolutely works you've asked here about bear bells I don't recommend bear bells I don't recommend bear bells because they don't identify you as human they've been shown to be in the same decibel

range as birds and bears are curious so we don't want to actually attract them so I actually don't recommend bear bells another thing you want to do Hannah is know your line of sight so if you're coming up to a blind corner you certainly want to be using your your voice and clapping your hands or singing loudly as you say before you're going to come around that corner warning the bear that you're coming we don't want surprise encounters so we want a really good line of sight around us

we want to keep our eyes open we want to keep our ears open and our nose open in bear country avoid those surprise encounters and let bears know we're coming also we never ever ever feed bears or provide food for them so bears can find their own food do not provide human food for them it really is true that a fed bear becomes a dead bear another thing that we want to keep in mind in preventing a bear encounter is the direction of the wind so is the wind blowing towards you is it carrying

or your scent down the trail so that the bear can get your scent before it's there so if you're using your voice and then it picks up your scent and the wind bears have an excellent sense of smell so if they can get that scent bears really do their best to coexist with us and a lot of times they'll just move right off that trail be silent as they can and allow you to pass by and you might not even know they're there so wind direction is really important wind direction is also important because

I highly recommend that if you're going into bear country you carry bear spray bear spray is an excellent excellent tool should you ever need it we'd ever want a negative encounter with the bear but should we have one we want to be prepared for it you're also really going to want to know your wind direction then because the last thing you want is to dispense that spray and get it back all over you because it really does debilitate you sort of incapacitates you for quite a while west has studied bears

all over the world and has not gotten killed one time so let's hear his advice okay lucy asked I've heard mixed reviews on tools like bear bells and bear bangers and a first hand seen that bear spray does basically nothing what are the best tools for people to have with them when they head out into bear country well lucy i'm gonna have to disagree with you on the bear spray thing i've also seen it firsthand a lot of times and i've seen it work almost every time i've seen it deployed whether that's

in person or in videos or anything my mentor was kind of the guy that wrote the paper on bear spray and it's been proven to be really really effective much more effective than firearms even so bear spray is definitely the number one tool i would recommend people take with them into bear country especially if you're going to be around brown bears the bear bells don't really work sometimes we actually joke around and call those dinner bells there's just nothing there's no real biological significance to that noise for bears

it doesn't really register for them it's not something that they necessarily pay attention to bear bangers which are like the little flares or the little pop gun kind of blast that you can shoot at them or like cracker shells or anything like that all that stuff works really well they don't like flares flying at them they don't like loud noises those all work for me i carry bear spray and then i have you know sometimes a firearm as a backup okay shelly car asked bears seem so gigantic compared to what they eat are

they just eating all the time that's all on caps or do they have a slow metabolism it's a great question they're pretty much just eating all the time especially in the fall right before hibernation when they go through hyperphasia that's a time when they really are trying to pack on the pounds and a bear will eat just about anything it comes across they just really don't pass up any kind of feeding opportunities so for example a bear on a salmon stream will eat dozens of salmon in a given day

a bear in a berry patch can eat over 100,000 berries in a single day and in hyperphasia they're eating like anywhere from like 30 to 60,000 calories a day so they're really just packing on the pounds and that's a big part of why human food is such a problem for them because them eating a box of twinkies essentially gives them the same amount of calories as they would for eating berries all day long so they really take advantage of any kind of high fat high sugar food they can get and once they get it they just want it more and

more and more so that's why the ones that get human food become problem bears but yeah they're really just that big because they don't pass up food bears are just shameless chowhounds prepping for winter and we love them for that except for when they eat the last of our cereal and Taslani has spent so much time photographing bears and even traveling by van on whims to different locations with his wife how do they keep their snacks safe patron Hilary Kremen had a question bear boxes

i know bear boxes are important for camping they're also expensive what's the next best thing typically if you're you know in a in a campsite they already have the metal lockers for you some campgrounds will even rent you a bear bin i've seen them for five dollars a week or so you can always go to your local gear store and get a bear canister those are usually 50 to 80 bucks and then you can get a really good one for two to 300 bucks but i think you know keeping yourself safe and keeping the bear safe

an 80 dollar investment is not really too much to ask if you simply cannot afford one then uh i suggest just being super conscious and cautious of uh your food handling store your food uh 100 yards away from when you're camping cook 100 yards away from when you're camping in a different direction you can try hanging your food although bears are pretty good climbers and usually can find a way to get to it but yeah i i think uh a bear canister is not that much but again if you can't do it

there's a way so you can get around it Wes is back to answer his last question on his list which i thought was very tender and sweet to be honest finally we have a question from Kate Murphy first time question asker asked my dad has always had a fear of bears so i asked him what he wanted to know here is questions one have bears been reported using tools yes they have recently there's a paper about a brown bear that actually used a rock that was barnacle encrusted and it was scratching itself with that rock

it like a positioned it just right so it could rub its body on it and scratch it and that was one of the first recorded bear tool use that's been like documented by scientists and it's in the literature this paper side note titled tool use in the brown bear ursis arctose appeared in the journal animal cognition and was written by dr vulker deke an associate professor in wildlife conservation at the university of cumbria and it paints quite a splashy picture it says the animal repeatedly picked up barnacle

encrusted rocks in shallow water manipulated and reoriented them in its fore pause and used them to rub its neck and muzzle the bear exhibited considerable motor skills when manipulating the rocks the bears like oh my god thank you so much so they do sometimes use tools but it's very rare and it really hasn't been recorded very many times really just once and then the second question is how do bears respond to music and do they sing bears don't like loud music if you're hiking on a trail and

you're playing loud music or something it's going to be annoying to all the other hikers but also bears typically tend to run away from any kind of music or loud music as far as if you were just to play like soothing music for bears for a while i'm sure they'd get used to it i don't know how exactly they'd respond to it and then the second part of that question is do they sing they don't sing as far as i know that's a great question they do as i mentioned earlier make a lot of different vocalizations but i've

never heard of a singing bear well thanks so much for the questions guys i'm really happy to answer them again my name is west larson you can find me on instagram at gris kid and then also a project that i'm working on right now that i'd love to tell you guys about is another podcast it's called tooth and claw it's about human wildlife conflict it's about attack stories we talk about these different animal attacks and then i explain what the people could have done better to avoid them and how they can prevent them

and we tell a lot of fun stories in that podcast so that's called tooth and claw yeah and that's pretty much it as far as the charity i've picked the grizzly bear foundation which is a great grizzly bear charity that i've done some good work with and i really like those guys so that's who i'd like to send the money to all right thanks a lot and this brings us to our final chapter chapter five pressing pause on bear peril let's go back to tia with the pollers because they seem the most screwed

also dr beckshaft i'm sorry that i made you read off the f word i believed it just in case you don't want it on record that i made you read off the f word about bears so kelsey story is asking how f**ked are bears in general and polar bears in particular the majority of the world's bears are in trouble because of human cost habitat loss for polar bears of course this habitat loss is the loss of sea ice their primary habitat for hunting traveling mating and for raising their young

and so to answer your question it really depends on our everyday choices and on the civic leaders that we elect if we want to limit the consequences of climate change on polar bears as well as humans we really need swift political action we need to vote with the climate in mind in each and every election and let our representatives know that we support bold climate action if we use this window of opportunity that we have for climate change solutions we can reduce the detrimental effects of climate change in the years

to come we will still see a decline in sea ice quality and extent and polar bears will suffer the consequences of that but if we manage to lower the temperature in the Arctic again the sea ice will eventually be restored and the bears will have a chance to thrive once again however if we choose to continue burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases at the current rate it is predicted that we could lose up to one third or more of the world's wild polar bears within the next 35 to 40 years

so yeah i cannot even overstate the importance of this we still have a window of opportunity if we act swiftly and we greatly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions we can absolutely still limit the adverse impacts of climate change not only in the Arctic but also globally we have fully we have the power to stop human cost climate change and to save the Arctic ecosystem including the polar bear Katie Timothy and probably a lot of other people

want to know how can we save the polar bears so polar bears need the sea ice as a platform for hunting seals without the sea ice polar bears won't have access to this incredibly energy rich prey that otherwise keeps them around and healthy so no sea ice means no polar bears we have to protect the Arctic sea ice and in addition to being essential to the health and safety of people and animals in the north it also plays an essential role in keeping our climate stable around the entire world

so to save the sea ice to protect polar bears and to improve conditions for people around the world we have to actively reduce the risks and the best way to do this is by reducing our use of fossil fuels because when we burn fossil fuels like coal and oil and natural gas for energy we release more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the atmosphere is like a blanket that surrounds the earth and normally it helps keep our world at a stable livable temperature

however every time we add extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere it's like we're thickening this blanket making it harder for the heat to escape and so this extra heat becomes trapped under the blanket warming up our world and disrupting the climate and for polar bears this disruption takes the form of habitat loss so the warmer the Arctic is the less sea ice is formed and again no sea ice means no polar bears each of us can play a role in protecting a polar bear's future

and our own by becoming involved in our communities and working to change systems so this means that we must vote with the climate in mind at every level of government supporting civic leaders who understand the importance of addressing climate change and who commit to making renewable energy the easy and affordable choice across all communities and in addition to this simply talking about climate change is incredibly valuable most people are just as worried about climate

change as you are but if we want to speed up that transition from fossil fuels to green energy we need to start including the climate and climate change solutions in our everyday conversations Catherine Finney is asking I've heard people propose we move the polar bears to Antarctica to help them avoid extinction is this bad of an idea as it sounds like it is well Catherine for some reason this is a question I get asked quite frequently

in other words there's probably a number of you out there wondering the exact same thing so in theory yes we could absolutely move some or even all polar bears from the arctic to Antarctica at least for a while they would probably thrive feasting on the penguins and Antarctic seals because Antarctic animals are not used to any predatory threat while they're on land so they would likely not even try to flee from the bears it would be like one big polar bear buffet

this obviously would also be one of the biggest problems with introducing polar bears to Antarctica the bears would just wreak absolute havoc on the Antarctic ecosystem and even if it were to happen a land chase between a polar bear and a penguin is no contest and very soon the penguin populations would be severely decimated the same would likely happen to the seals not least because polar bears would be able to eat their way through the seal pumping fields with no problems and Antarctic seals give birth

on the open sea ice and not in birth layers under the snow as the Arctic ring seal does which is the polar bear's primary prey so in other words what started out as a feast for the polar bears would soon turn to famine instead because the available prey would disappear leaving the polar bears with nothing to eat and so you know while this devastation of the Antarctic ecosystem would be the most obvious reason to not move the bears to Antarctica there are other considerations too for example

even though they're similar at first glance Antarctica is on average much colder than the Arctic temperatures easily go as low as minus 60 degrees celsius or minus 76 degrees fahrenheit polar bears are really well insulated but not for temperatures that are this low for very long and it will require massive extra amounts of food year round to keep the bears with the energy needed to stay warm and alive and so sufficient prey is unlikely to be available year round in the Antarctic

and the bears could end up freezing or starving to death logistics would be another challenge which bears would you move would you attempt to still keep the currently existing polar bear subpopulation separate how would you catch them and also very importantly who would pay the simply enormous cost of the project so to sum up yep moving polar bears to Antarctica could definitely be done but it would create more problems that it would solve the reasons i listed above are just a few

for why moving the bears would be an ecological disaster in every imaginable way polar bears evolved in the north and are superbly perfectly evolved for the Arctic environment that they inhabit and so moving polar bears to Antarctica in the hope of saving the species would be an extremely short-sighted solution indeed so I for one strongly suggest that we instead focus all of our energy on curving climate change drew ways in on our brown bear friends Ryan G asks how are bears coping with

climate change not just polar bears but all bears i think most people have heard how polar bears are coping with climate change but brown bears and black bears are much more adaptable than their polar cousins so here in Alaska specifically the brown bears that specialize in salmon are going to have problems with warming warming streams warming water temperatures once a certain temperature threshold is breached those streams can no longer support salmon

and that's when bears are going to start roaming around and looking for other food sources potentially bringing them into proximity and conflict with humans and when bears and humans have conflict the bears always lose to give them a little bit of a win Drew asked that a donation be made to friends of the McNeil River and you will find a link to them in the show notes now if you are team bear in your heart but you want to be professionally team bear Dr. Lana has advice so Rebecca writes that she wants to be an

ursinologist and that all of her bear research and field work so far has been through various volunteer programs so she's asking me if there is a specific branch of work that i would recommend like the national park service versus sanctuaries versus independent researchers so Rebecca no i am there isn't a branch that i would recommend it takes all of us and it takes all of those people to truly put together a conservation effort what i would recommend is that you decide you take a look at yourself and all the work going on out there

and what really interests you which branch of bears really fascinates you and follow that follow your passion Rebecca followed up her question with what branch of research would i recommend to basically how does she get to live my life as an independent research scientist working on bears so Rebecca in all honesty i came across bears in my undergrad in one of my classes and i did a directed study on them and then i did an undergraduate thesis because it just

it really fascinated me i did it on bears being disrupted during denning by snowmobiles and it's something i at that time in my life had never thought about this is well back in the 1990s and so i just started following that and reading reading more about it and did an undergraduate thesis on the bear poaching trade and then decided that i was really interested in bears and wanted to continue in this realm so i was really interested in bear human interactions so i sought out dr steven harrero

and if you haven't read his book bear attacks their causes and avoidance it is still the bible today for bears and human bear encounters and i applied for a masters with steve harrero and i got accepted into that program and did my masters with him on human bear conflicts in a park called leard river hot springs provincial park in northern bc that was on black bears and still obsessed with bears i traveled around working as a technician for a number of different people on a number of different field projects in a number of different locations all across canada

and decided i wanted to do my phd this time i wanted to work with grizzly bears and i wanted to get my mathematical skills up my quantitative and my modeling skills up so i located a professor at the university of alberta dr mark voice who was very strong in that field and i followed that passion and i did the parsnip grizzly bear project so i guess basically what this long answer to your question is is i just kept following my passion and i just kept following what i wanted to do um and like you i also volunteer

countless hours towards conservation kimberley notes that she's fascinated by carnivores and would love to get involved in some research so she asks what gaps are there in research on ursidae in general so kimberley if we're looking at gaps i guess now for our north american bear species i think a hot topic is climate change so how is warming affecting bears for from a human bear conflict perspective so what i specialize in we're seeing a shortening of the denning period so bears are not denning for as long in some areas

and that can of course increase human bear conflicts because they're out of the den for a longer period so they have more time to potentially get in conflict with humans another thing we're seeing in coastal populations is a look at the salmon runs so we'll look at the food resources for bears what's going on with them and with global warming and the temperature rise in rc what's happening with our salmon and if that is affected what in turn will happen with those coastal bears

and looking at this question from an international perspective so in my work with the iucn bear specialist group there are a number of gaps with our asian species so sun bears we're really just starting to learn about them their ecology their biology so things we kind of take for granted that we know of with our north american species we're just learning about those things with a number of species over in asia the sloth bear the sun bear and also in south america the spectacle bear

so this comes back sort of to rebecca's question kimberley you need to just ask yourself what area really fascinates you and what can we look at um in that area another big topic with bears is connectivity so trying to reconnect these small and isolated populations that we have so we'll see that um even in the us where you're likely based or i'm assuming you're based so trying to reconnect these populations so taking these islands and linking them back up for the health of the bears and the genetics of those bear species

connectivity threatened populations so lots in conservation biology that is still left to explore in thinking about kimberley and rebecca's questions and with those of you who are listening that are really interested in bears or all you want to be ursinologists which by the way is a new word for me that i'm going to call myself from now on because i quite like it anyway i encourage you to check out the international association for bear research and management so the acronym is the iba or

the international association for bear research and management that is our international association we host conferences there's a number of great people there's a jobs board there's a newsletter you can read what's going on what projects are going on around the world um and you can find out a lot more information on bears from the iba also the bear specialist group so the iucn international union for the conservation of natures bear specialist group also has a web page it is linked to on the iba web page

and that can show you more on the research that our teams are doing and what's going on around the world with our bear species so thank you very much for having me and i hope that those listening will think about bears when they go out into bear habitat and the conservation of bears and protecting their habitat and minimizing negative human bear encounters you can follow dr charniello on twitter at lana charniello and very much suggest you do she's awesome what about polar bear expert

dr tia beckshaft if you want to follow me online you can find me on facebook and on instagram at polar bear questions you can also find me on twitter at bio tia now the charity that i choose to support is polar bears international polar bears international is a non-profit conservation organization and their mission is to conserve polar bears and the ci's that they depend on and this work is done through media through science and advocacy to inspire people to care about the Arctic the threats to its future and to the

connection between this remote region and our global climate and of course we're tossing some cash toward danielle rivette's org of choice thank you for the donation to a bear charity of my choosing and for this particular episode i would appreciate it if any donations could go to the idaho black bear rehab that's in garden city idaho i'm not originally from idaho i'm from virginia but this particular rehab is operated by a wildlife rehabber who has basically dedicated the last 30 years of her life

to giving orphaned black bear cubs a second chance they are able to rescue and rehabilitate and release orphan cubs whenever they get them in and they just really have a great bear rehab program they have lots of trained rehabilitators that work there and they try to work with the state wildlife agencies to make sure that bear rehab is a standard part of their management policies now they're also very involved in educating the public about black bear rehab and how all of us really are responsible for protecting wild

bears and their habitat so idaho black bear rehab is a really really great place to think about maybe making a donation if you're interested in that kind of thing that's idaho black bear rehab in garden city idaho thank you so much ali for having me this has been so much fun i'm so glad to say that i've finally now been on an episode of oligies i am so excited i never thought that that would ever happen so thank you so so much for that and for everyone who sent in such

great questions for us to answer um if you're interested i am on twitter you can follow me there at grizzlygirl87 that's g-r-i-z-z-l-y-g-i-r-l-8-7 on twitter also if you're interested we did just recently get started with a zooniverse project called the arctic bears project so you can if you're familiar with zooniverse you can go there and look at a lot of the camera track photos that we've been getting of all the different kinds of arctic animals that we see

at the remote field camps in waffisk national park where we are using remote trail camps to monitor the western hudson bay polar bear population but we have lots of other really cool animals on those photos as well and it just kind of gives you an opportunity to go through and and see what kinds of animals and the data and the photos that we're working with it's so cool lots of cute little caribou babies and polar bear babies and all sorts of really exciting things there so make sure you go to zooniverse and check out the arctic bears project

so help scientists help the bears you can do that right now even if you are in no pants or on a bus or on a bus with no pants or in Antarctica with no bears and let this be a lesson to ask seven smart experts doofy questions about bears because look at this wealth of information and love for bears we now have oh also i would like to be friends with all of them if that is okay now there are links to all of the great things we talked about with chris morgan and to so many things that we

chatted about with these six ursonologists up at alleyward.com slash ology slash ursonology there's also links to their socials in the show notes i suggest you follow all of them right now and get more bears in your timeline i did there is no looking back it's the best choice i've made in 2021 now you can follow us at ologies on twitter and instagram i'm both at alleyward with one l ology's merch is available at ologiesmerch.com thank you shannon feltis and bonnie dutch who hosts the kami podcast you are that

for managing the merch thank you erin talbert for admitting the ologies podcast facebook group thank you noel for scheduling so much it makes so amazing thank you emily white of the website wordery for making transcripts of the episodes kaleb patin bleeps them and those are up at alleyward.com slash ologies dash extras linked to that in the show notes thank you to full-time fiance and co-editor jared sleeper for getting through these edits with me this episode turned out to be

a real beast and i'm so excited about it and i'm so happy to have it out in the world even if we were stumbling to put it up and as always thank you steven ray moores of the per cast and the dino podcast see Jurassic right for bearing with these big episodes as well nick thoreburn wrote and performed the theme music and if you listen until the end you're forced to hear me confess something to you and this week i'm just gonna straight up say it i don't think i knew until way too recently that there were no polar bears in Antarctica

i never learned that until probably like two years ago maybe if that i kind of thought that all the polar bears were down there i was like that's where the ice is right i had no idea also when i was a kid i thought that there was an Antarctica in the on the bottom and then there was like an arctica continent on the top kind of like earth was a burger and those were just ice buns so hey you know what we don't all know everything okay apparently there's no bears in Antarctica

who knew it meant no bears earth sinologists also hummus tastes pretty good on hard boiled eggs now you know until next week where i put up an episode on time probably tuesdays tuesday morning i got this okay whereby