Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 93 | Rae Wynn-Grant on Bears, Humans, and Other Predators

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an interesting and precarious place to live; while you might be the boss of your local environment, you also depend on the functioning of an entire ecology. Rae Wynn-Grant is a carnivore ecologist who studies how large predators migrate, feed, reproduce — and especially how they interact with humans. We talk about the diverse social structures of different species of carnivores, how they find mates, and how they diversify their diet. And of course we discuss how humans and other locally-dominant species can live together peacefully. Rae Wynn-Grant received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Columbia University. She is currently a Fellow with National Geographic Society working on carnivore conservation in partnership with the American Prairie Reserve. She maintains a Visiting Scientist position at the American Museum of Natural History, and adjunct faculty positions at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. She appears in National Geographic's Born Wild: The Next Generation, premiering on April 22. Web site National Geographic web page AMNH web page Johns Hopkins web page Talk on Humans and Conflicts with Bears Twitter

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On this episode of plant killers, we'll explore one nation's most notorious fruit and vegetable killer, bad dirt. What makes bad dirt so bad? The answer? The ingredients. But fear not true crime enthusiasts. This story has a happy ending. Miracle Grow organic raised bed and garden soil. It's made with quality organic ingredients from upcycled green waste like compost and aged bark. Unlike the other guys who can't say the same, looks like bad dirt's murdering days are over. Thanks to Miracle Grow. Join us next time on Plant Kelly. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And today, hopefully everyone is staying safe, staying healthy, still under lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, and so forth. What we're offering you today is a chance to be distracted a little bit by one of humanity's favorite things to be distracted by. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Mostly bears, to be perfectly honest. But what we're going to be talking about are carnivorous animals, predators in the wine. and both how they hang out and how they hang out with human beings, how they interact with us and how they should interact with us. So my guest is Dr. Ray Wynne Grant, who is a large carnivore ecologist. She studies, again, bears are her favorite thing, but also lions and other large predators, and tries to figure out what their behavior is out there in the wild,

how far they go when they go for walking, their mating habits, stuff like that. As we will learn, as I learned, you know, this is not a Gorillas in the Mist or Jane Goodall hanging out with the chimpanzees kind of situation. Basically, you don't want to hang out with the bears. You don't want to live with the bears. Werner-Hertzog movies, notwithstanding, you want to like touch the bears just enough to put a collar on them, trace them, see where they're going, and then let them do their thing. But it's an important thing because we want to be able to live in harmony or as close as we can come to it. with the wildlife around us, and some of that wildlife is dangerous. Some of that wildlife is big and has claws and teeth and can hurt us.

We want to protect that as well. So we need to understand it scientifically, and that's what we'll be talking about today. The other thing to mention is that Ray is going to appear on a TV special. I'm releasing this podcast Monday, April 20th. Wednesday, April 22, is, of course, Earth Day. And for Minescape fans, it is also the birthday of Ariel and Caliban by cats, But that is a coincidence that Ariel and Caliban were born on Earth Day. More importantly, National Geographic is releasing a special to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22.

It's a television event called Born Wilde the Next Generation, and Ray will appear in there a whole bunch of other people. Ray, in fact, works as a fellow for the National Geographic Society as well as being a visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History. So if you want to see more, because the pictures and the videos are always a hugely compelling part of this kind of story. The audio is great. The audio conversation we had was very entertaining. But if you really want to feel yourself there out in the wild with the bears and the lions, watch the TV special. And with that, let's go. Ray Wynn Grant, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. It's certainly a fascinating topic to talk about. So I think that the tentative title I came up for this podcast episode is Ray Wyn Grant on bears, humans, and other predators. And predators are sort of weirdly alluring, weirdly compelling, right? Like, what is it that makes us so interested in giant animals that can easily kill us? Well, you know, I have a lot of different theories on this, but they are so good for storytelling. Right? And stories are such an important part of human culture worldwide throughout history.

And, you know, the danger element again. Like it just feeds in so well to stories. And they're just, they're charismatic. I mean, not every carnivore out there in the world is the most charismatic animal, but everything from bears, lions, sharks. I mean, the really cool, like carnivorous plants. Like, they're fascinating. They just are. So, you know, I can't blame people for being captivated by them. They hooked me. It did strike me while I was thinking about this, that our most popular domestic pets come from carnivores, from predators, right?

Dogs and cats. I mean, there are bunnies and hamsters, but there's nothing quite like a good, dangerous cat to get people really interested. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. In fact, you know, I was just watching an old episode of Cosmos with Nail DeGras-Tyson, where he details how, you know, we domesticated wolves into dogs ages ago and why and how it's such a mutually beneficial relationship.

And it was just, you know, it's just, I think that kind of story never gets old as well, you know, to really understand that we took the vicious wild animals that could have killed us and turned them into man's best friend. Well, certainly you count as someone who is fascinated by these things. I want to get into the science of it, but let me just first ask, about your research process. Like, you know, there's lots of pictures of you out there in the field with bears, with lions, and so forth. Are you, so number one, what do you do? Number two, is it mostly you're studying the animals for their own sakes, or is it the interaction with

human beings that you care about? Yeah, great questions. And, you know, I'm always happy to talk about myself. So I'm a carnivore ecologist. You know, ecology is a study of organisms and how they interact with their environments, carnivores, you know, to oversimplify or meat-eating organisms. And I have a lot of great images out there of me handling some large carnivores because I do a lot of field work. So there's a lot of ways to do carnivore ecology. I like to tell people that, you know, wildlife ecologists can be in the field, in the lab, in the office. You know, there's all different ways to do this work. But I choose to, you know, kind of do a hybrid of field work and field biology and then data analysis, which is, you know,

bringing me back into the office space. Yeah. And my primary goals at this moment and since I started my career are to look at patterns of movement and behavior. And so usually when I'm out there, you know, trapping, let's use bears for an example, you know, trapping bears and handling them, It's so that I can attach a GPS collar to these animals. So I do not just, you know, go out into the wilderness and find bears and cuddle them for fun, although I can't deny that it is extremely fun. It is extremely purposeful, right? Very, very, very purposeful. And the only way to get a GPS unit on an animal is to capture that animal and put that collar on.

And so that's where most of those images come from. So there's a lot of photos out there of me with bears that are sleeping. They have been sedated so that I can do this work. And that is probably, you know, the last time that I will come into physical contact with that animal for a year or two until I find them again to take the color off and then I probably don't interact with them again. So it's really important for me to drive home to, you know, a lot of folks out there that the best ecology is non-invasive. You know, it's not a great idea to get animals used to humans and habituated to humans. So really, like, sedating them for a few moments, getting these devices on, you know, doing health checks, you know, checkups, especially with, you know, juveniles or babies.

And then getting out of there and getting that data, you know, analyzing those patterns and learning about the animal from as far away from as possible is the best method. I mean, there are other approaches, right? I mean, everyone knows about Jane Goodall and, you know, living with. with chimpanzees where it's almost more anthropology, where you're really trying to study their behavior by interacting with them. So it's very good. You've been very clear that you're in there

to sort of attach some data capturing device to them and then let them live their natural life. And that's what you're actually trying to study. That's exactly right. And you know, Jane Goodall is a huge, huge inspiration for me. So in a lot of ways, I bow down to her and her early work. But again, she wasn't going to be. every chimpanzee population, you know, on the continent of Africa and living with them,

she was taking one to use as a case study to understand their behavior so that we don't have to go into the other populations and do the same thing. Right. Right. So it's kind of like, you know, just they're taking one for the team, you know, becoming habituated to humans so that we can understand their biology, their ecology, use that information to kind of make scientific conclusions for the whole species. Okay, so I really would have sort of put myself in as much of the shoes or boots of you when you're out there tracking the bears as I can. I mean, do you know exactly where the bear is going to be? How do you sedate it? That is one question. Oh, yeah, I love talking about this stuff. So probably some of my worst and most boring stories

from the field are about looking for bears because the answer to your question is no, we do not know where they are going to be. I thought so, yeah. You know, if we use black bears as an example, I think it's hilarious because when I tell people that I study black bears, almost everybody I tell has a black bear story to tell me. You know, they went camping, they saw a bear, you know, they grew up in Vermont and bears used to come into their backyards. You know, whatever it is, so many folks have a bear story. I, however, actually, struggle to find bears when I need to find them. I don't know if it's like bad luck, if I have a curse, whatever it is.

In my entire life, I have never seen a bear on accident. Oh my goodness, even I've done that. Ever. Ever, never. I mean, I would love it. So, you know, when I'm looking for these extremely wild, you know, backcountry animals, a lot of the time I am hiking, camping in the backcountry for sometimes weeks on end, setting traps, you know, and these are baited traps. Okay. To lure bears to the trap so that they will be captured. I can tranquilize them, put the collar on, and then release them.

So to be clear, when we're talking about baiting a trap, I'm baiting it with things like, you know, a can of tuna fish, something that is like, yummy smelling, but also appropriate. Bears eat a lot of fish, so it is, you know, very natural for them. And then these traps are typically what we call barrel traps or culvert traps, which are very large, so they're, you know, big enough to hold a couple of bears in them. It's almost like a big cage. Oh, okay. Where the bear walks into the trap, the food, the baited food is at the back. Once it uses its paw to take the food, a door closes on the opposite side. And I check that trap. twice a day to make sure a bear isn't in there for too long. It is contained in there, so it gives me an easy shot to kind of stick it with a jabstick with the sedative. Okay, so it's not like a gun

from distance. You have to get close enough to poke the bear, literally. Yes, quite literally. And, you know, not to get it twisted, we do have tranquilizer guns. Those are typically used when a bear is in a tree. And I would say like when a bear is causing a problem, right, like if they were having a human bear conflict issue, when a bear is, you know, in somebody's backyard going through their trash and then, you know, the authorities show up and the bear goes up a tree, that's when we might have to shoot it with a tranquilizer just so that we can get it backed out and take it and release it back into the forest. But when it comes to me trapping bears for the purposes of putting a collar on them, and it's really just like a syringe on the edge. of a long stick. Sometimes I can whittle that stick together myself. And you just, like you just poke the bear in the shoulder, it is probably about the same as getting a flu shot and less, you know, possibly less painful. In about five or ten minutes, they fall asleep. They're asleep for about an hour. You know, I'll weigh them, measure them,

take their temperature. I have to use rectal thermometers. I always try to throw that in there because people think it's amusing, you know, check the bear for parasites, right? So for ectoparasites. But you also threw in there that you weigh them. That sounds like an extraordinary bit of effort there. Yeah, you know, I'm only able to weigh these bears if I'm working with a team. So certainly sometimes when I'm doing this fieldwork, I'm alone or maybe with one other assistant. But if I'm ever lucky enough to have a team with me, which is about half of the time, we weigh the bear. So when it is sedated and out cold, we have a tarp, we kind of all lift the, you know, many hundreds of pound bears onto the tarp. And we'll have like a big stick.

So we'll find some type of big, you know, log or something nearby, kind of rope the tarp around the log. We have a scale that we bring with us. Okay. It is all very makeshift, but we weigh the bear in terms of kilograms right there in the wilderness. Let me pause for a second to talk about Grammarly. Grammarly is a digital writing assistant that works across a wide variety of platforms, Gmail, Google Docs, Slack, and so forth. And I think of it not just as a spell checker or grammar checker,

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premium at grammarly.com slash mindscape, G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash mindscape. So how, I mean, when the bear is in the trap, is it sad? Is it angry? Are these bears used to this kind of nonsense? Or is it like an angry bear that you have to deal with? Yeah, they're certainly not used to it. So it's very unnatural. One of the things that I love about bears is that they don't have any natural predators in their environments, right? They're top of the food chain, their apex predators themselves. So I find that they are not super afraid necessarily of being in a trap. You know, they just bears don't have a lot of fear. I see. But they will get, you know, they will get aggravated because they don't want to be in there,

especially once the food is gone. They want to like keep it moving. So it's really important. just, you know, to be humane, to make sure that the bear doesn't have too much of a stress response, to make sure that we are not keeping them in there for more than a couple of hours. You know, I will also say big, large carnivores do a lot of resting. So it is not uncommon to have a bear go into a trap, get the food, realize it can't get out, and have it just lay down for a bit and, you know, kind of just take a rest in the shade. Yeah, that part has been preserved in the domestication. cat, I can assure you.

A lot of resting. It's a perfect example. And so then you put the collar on and it's a GPS system. Is that it or is there more complicated apparatus involved? No, it's a GPS collar. So, you know, kind of the same GPS that we might have in our smartphones. It's a small device that hangs off of the collar. It is very light.

Many of them are kind of large in size, but that does not equate to a heavy weight. Yeah, okay. So it's just this like light. white collar that goes on the bear and the GPS sends a signal to a satellite out in outer space and the satellite sends a signal to my computer that lets me know the longitude and latitude of the bear every couple of hours. And so that is that data gets stored in a database and updated every few hours. And I have way more data than I would ever need of, you know, where this bear is going. and looking over the course of a year or best case scenario over two years,

we're able to really establish the home range of the animal and understand where it goes and where it spends its time. So you're not tempted to put a little camera on there, a little webcam on the collar? I wish we could get that far. I wish we had that type of opportunities. But we really don't. We do a lot of trail cameras, I will say. So, you know, now that I am associated with National Geographic, I've been introduced to all of these cool photographers who often accompany biologists into the field.

And they set these great camera traps. And they really position them. I mean, it's amazing the type of images that they get. So, you know, maybe there's a carcass that they expect a wolf or a bear or mountain lion to come back to at some point. And they'll position this camera trap, you know, right there at the carcass and get these amazing images. I use camera traps absolutely all the time, but when I'm using them, it's just to keep an eye on my bear trap. And that is because from time to time, I will set a trap and actually have non-bear animals go in, steal the food, and go back out without being trapped. So I put camera traps out just to see what's going on and why I keep striking out.

And these bears are, this is North America, you're mostly doing this? Yeah, I do my work in North America. There's, you know, there's eight different bear species around the world over four continents. I study North American bears at the moment. So black bears and brown bears, and I'm hoping, sometimes soon, some polar bears. Okay. But of course, you know, brown bears are also in parts of Europe and Asia. And so, you know, a lot of the conclusions and the ecological information that we're getting from them is useful in other parts of the world.

And so what is it that we're actually learning from these GPS studies? I mean, clearly, their range, but is it more behavioral? Is it more ecological? Yeah, it's both. It's both. So I like to do a lot of comparisons and compare the movement of bears that live in what we'll call the back country, so areas very, very far from human presence. And compare that to the movement of bears that live in and around areas of high human activity. And we're finding, you know, some things that might seem,

obvious to people that backcountry bears, you know, will have a much larger home range. So, you know, a lot of people will call that territory size. Bears are cool. They're solitary animals. So you're not going to find like a mama bear and a Papa bear hanging out together despite what children's stories might tell us. They're by themselves. And so they are also territorial. And so they like to establish their own territory. So we'll see like really, really big home ranges for bears that have that kind of space. But for, you know, for lack of a better word, urban bears, I don't want people to take that term too far because they're not, you know, in the cities. But for bears that kind of live on the edge of the human wildland interface, we're finding,

you know, much more condensed home ranges, much more overlap, especially in areas where there are, you know, an abundance of food resources. I also love using GPS collars to look at at where female bears den in the winter. One of the coolest things about North American bears, I think, is that they hibernate, and that is awesome. And, you know, figuring out where they choose to make their den is really interesting. There's some patterns that we see there. You know, sometimes we see female bears choosing to den closer to areas of human activity and male bears denning further from human activity. You know, it raises a lot of questions. Are females doing that because the males have picked the best habitat and they have to go for second best habitat? Or is there

something about being near to people that is actually a better place for females to Dene, especially when they're giving birth to Cubs? You know, a lot of unanswered questions there, but to me it's fascinating. I mean, I have plenty of colleagues at Caltech who live in Pasadena or Alta Dina and get bears showing up to their swimming pools in their backyards all the time. So we are at the bear human interface right around here. I can believe that. You sure are. And so, So it's interesting. So when the bears hibernate, they do it solo. They're not, they're not with a pal. That's right. Yes. So, you know, again, I like to often go back to children's stories because they're so sweet. They always have these like very pleasant bear families, you know, and like bear communities all hanging out. And that is just so not realistic. Yeah. Bears are by themselves. So like one bear, you know, in.

in a large part of the forest. Again, they are, you know, they are not close together even when hibernating in dens. So the only time you're going to have more than one bear in a den is if you have a female who has given birth and has cubs with her. Okay. Something that I think is awesome, that I think everyone should think is awesome, is that females begin hibernation while pregnant and actually give birth in the den. So in the ecology community, we basically estimate that every bear in North America that's ever been born was born in January.

That is just around the time. We all give them like a January 1st, January 15th, birth date estimate. That's around the time that females give birth in the den. And then they give birth to these teeny, tiny little bears. I mean, black bear cubs at birth can be about a pound. Holy bear cubs at birth can be about a pound and a half. They're really, really small.

And they're kind of hairless and blind. And they just, you know, a couple of them come out. They nurse on their mother for, you know, three, four, or five months until it's safe to come out of the den. And by that time, they're big and they're strong and they're able to take on the world. How big is a litter? So a litter is typically two to three for black bears, two to three for brown bears as well. But they can be big. I mean, we usually don't see four or more, but depending on the region, two or three is typical.

It's a little interesting to me that they don't hang out in families because since human beings do, there's this inevitable temptation to say things like, well, of course, mothers and fathers stick with their children because they want to protect their genetic line and preserve it and so forth. But then every such generalization has a million counter examples in the animal kingdom. I mean, why don't male Papa bears want to protect their kids? Is there an explanation for that kind of thing? You know, we don't necessarily have an explanation for it, but it is in line with solitary wildlife species. So, you know, the social animals, and if we stick with carnivores, the social carnivores, do that, right?

So wolves will create a pack, and they will, you know, the wolf dad will take his wolf daughter off and teach her out a hunt and always protect her, and they're like a very strong, family unit. We see that with lion prides, right? So, you know, a male lion, you know, at the top of its harem, we'll have all these different females, but we'll make sure that no one's really going anywhere. But with, you know, with bears, with mountain lions, with other solitary predators, we're really just seeing very, very different behavior. They're kind of all for one, one for all. You know, a male bear will mate with a female and probably never see her again and never see

his offspring. But is there some theoretical understanding of what makes a species social or not in that sense? Not necessarily that I'm aware of, at least. It's really kind of this like pack animal mentality. And I think it also has a lot to do with how they eat, right? Like how they eat and how they feed. So if you look at bears, I mean, they're so, they're so fortunate that they, although they're carnivores, they are highly omnivorous, right? So their diet, they have a lot of dietary plasticity. is how we say it in ecology. So they do great eating fish, you know, taking down deer. And parts of the country where I study bears, we see them, you know, eating wild horses,

you know, the fawns of wild horses. I mean, a lot of highly carnivorous kind of predatory behavior. But they also do just as well eating fruit and eating root vegetables and nuts and seeds and berries and all of that kind of thing. And because of that, they're kind of less dependent on each other or on a group to you know, to find food resources and survive. You know, mountain lions are obligate carnivores. They do a lot of hunting. They have to kind of cash their prey away once they make a kill. But they seem to do pretty well being independent. I would love to kind of dig into more of the theory of why some are

and some aren't. But at this point, you know, bears just do their own thing. It's one of the things I love about them because I love my alone time. I consider myself a solitary predator. Bears are introverts. Yeah, like an introvert in a lot of ways. I just really like, you know, like having my own space and so I can relate to them a lot. Well, I mean, this is, it raises up a whole other set of questions that I was interested in asking you about. I mean, why are there carnivores at all, predators at all, uh, in the sense that a carnivore, something that eats other animals relies on a whole huge ecosystem, more or less operating pretty well, right? Because those animals have to eat plants and those plants have to exist.

Whereas if you just eat the plants directly, maybe things are a little bit more flexible for you. Is it just a matter of efficiency? I know there's, of course, far fewer predators, carnivores than there are herbivores, but they are there in just about every ecosystem, right? Pretty much, yeah. And we see a lot of issues when carnivores are removed from different ecosystems. So they are important, and I love that you were able to acknowledge that we don't need as many carnivores, you know, in a space as we do herbivores and, you know, composters and all of the others. But they play a big role. I love using bears as an example again. They are really incredible seed dispersers, you know. So we depend on bats, we depend on, you know, other types of animals, herbivores for seed dispersing.

But bears do a great job of that. But they also distribute vital nutrients that they get from eating animals. So if we take, you know, those brown bears up in Alaska that, you know, just go crazy eating salmon during the salmon run, when they poop all throughout the forest, they're distributing vital nitrogen all throughout the forest that comes from eating salmon. those fish and digesting those bones that allows the forest to regenerate and keep growing. So the plant community is in a lot of ways dependent on carnivores eating meat and getting those types of nutrients, especially nitrogen, and distributing it pretty far and wide. You thought a soft mattress meant comfort, but every morning your back tells a different story. This is the sound of support, the sound of air weave.

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but, you know, protein goes a long way, right? So we know that herbivores, for example, really have to spend so much time grazing, so much time eating. You know, many of them don't hibernate. They have to make sure that, you know, they're able to access resources all year round. and it's kind of a constant behavior, right? Like they're very, very driven by being able to, you know, to eat however many tons of, you know, vegetation per day that they need to survive. Whereas carnivores, if they get a good high-protein meal, they don't have to do that again

for maybe a day or two days. So they actually are able to spend more time mating, spend more time, you know, finding new territories, spending, spend more time, you know, pooping and dispersing nutrients throughout the forest. it's really, really great for them to be able to take that protein, let it, you know, state their appetite, and then do all the other things that animals need to do. And sleeping. Yeah, there's a lot of sleeping that gets done. And so much sleeping. Can't you see why I love them so much? It's like eating, sleeping, resting, exploring. They've got it figured out. They just got it made. That's right.

And how do carnivores get along with each other? I mean, I read somewhere when thinking about this episode that carnivores don't eat other carnivores, but do they compete with other carnivores generally, different species of carnivores? So you bring up a question. You bring up a question that has been answered in some ways, but really depends on region and the way that different environments may change over time or might be changing in response to human activity. So for the most part, yeah, they're not eating each other, right? So we don't typically find carnivores eating each other. If I were to just oversimplify, it's because they don't want

to expend too much energy. If a mountain lion wanted to eat a bear, it would have to fight so, so hard. And nobody has time for that. They're a little bit lazy. And so it's way easier to like find a nest of eggs, to find a sick or very young or weak herbivore. to take down, then to pick a fight with another big strong creature. So that's pretty much why they don't do it. But, you know, it's not completely unheard of for a very, very hungry carnivore to come across a carcass of another one and maybe take a few bites. I mean, that's not totally unheard of because survival is also important.

And remind me of the other part of your question before I get too far. Oh, sorry, I've already forgotten it, but that's... I had an answer for it, so I'm getting a little frustrated. But, no, I'm just wondering, you know, why there are, you know, do carnivores sort of carve out sort of domains of influence? Do they, like, say, okay, you can get this kind of species? Like if there are wolves and bears in the same ecosystem, if they don't attack each other, do they at least compete for similar resources? Or is there an unspoken agreement between them? Right. And so that's where we find a lot of complementarity in these ecosystems. So I think it's just so beautiful how nature often just kind of works together. It's like a puzzle, right? And everyone kind of has their own fit in the puzzle for the most part. Again, things are going to be widely different if there is a change in the availability of resources for one carnivore, one herbivore, then things will really get messed up and pretty skewed. And that's where we see, you know,

know, some really interesting things happening in ecology. I'll give you an example from my study area in the western Great Basin, so kind of the area where Nevada meets California and the Sierra's, where we have seen an increase in the black bear population over the last 20, 30 years, a very rapid increase in the black bear population, and a much slower increase in the mountain lion population. So the mountain lion population has remained pretty much stable, you know, increasing, but not as not as fast of a rate as black bears. And mountain lions typically, you know, they are hunting deer, they are hunting, you know, elk, they're getting all of those herbivores. And we've seen as we've gotten more and more black bears that they've actually started to push mountain lions off of their kills. So when a mountain line kills something and kind of stashes it away in a tree, we're seeing black bears.

a black bear, you know, one at a time, kind of come in and steal that carcass from the mountain lion. Whereas typically they wouldn't do that, right? So we're actually seeing, you know, when we have collared bear and a collared mountain lion, if we look at our map, we're actually seeing them interacting in space and time, actually kind of having a face off over these kills. Whereas normally bears would just kind of like take their fish, take their eggs, you know, eat all the juniper berries. that are around, you know, dig up all their root vegetables. And so this is atypical behavior from what we understand about, you know, predator to predator ecology and behavior.

And it's really, really fascinating. So a lot of us are questioning, is it because the climate is changing? Are there fewer vegetation options for bears? Are there, you know, more people in this part of Nevada and California so that it's actually restricting bears from going to places where they would normally get their food. You know, really, what is it about what's changing in the environment and creating this kind of non-perfect, you know,

I talked about the perfect puzzle that carnivores make, and we're seeing some disruption to that. Is there some relationship between being a carnivore and intelligence in a species? Do you need to be a little bit quicker on the ball to survive in this kind of environment? You know, I don't want to make too many generalizations, because, you know, if we were to talk about what we consider some of the most intelligent animals on the planet, I think the top few would be herbivores. You know, we could think of a lot of, like, big whale species that are non-carnivorous.

We could think about elephants. They're herbivores. We could think about, you know, mountain gorillas. You know, they might eat some insects, but they're primarily herbivorous. But at the same time, you know, that predatory nature. And the ability to kind of understand, like, opportunity, like fear versus opportunity, risk versus reward, is really unique to, you know, apics predators like carnivores. And so there's, I would argue, a different kind of intelligence that is inherent in them. And maybe sharks are an example of a successful predator that might not be that smart.

There you go. Yeah, there you go. I mean, I always have trouble talking about an animal not being smart because I feel like it's kind of disrespectful. You know, we're animals too, and yeah, we're brilliant. But exactly. So sharks, you know, are fairly impulse-driven and make a lot of mistakes. So that would be a good example. And you meant, but you alluded to the idea that the populations are growing in the United States for black bears, for mountain lions.

Is that because we're getting better at conservation? Yeah, I mean, I love as a, you know, ecologist, as a conservation scientist, I love to talk about conservation success stories because we're often plagued with what's not working. You know, we can talk about carnivores on the brink of extinction around the world all day long. I mean, look at tigers, look at lions, look at sharks like we were saying. But in the United States, there's been a lot of conservation attention to carnivores, to wolves, right? I mean, as controversial as they can be, you know, wolves, grizzly bears, black bears, polar bears, mountain lions. We've done a really good job of giving them attention, you know, putting some policies and legislation in order to protect their habitats. And for many of these species, it has worked.

So if you went back 50, 60 years, there were very few black bears in a lot of spaces, and they've been restored to a lot of ecosystems. In 2016, at the end of the Obama administration, he was able to take the Florida, I'm sorry, the Louisiana black bear off of the endangered species list. And so that leaves no subspecies of black bears on the endangered species list anymore, which is tremendous. Think of another carnivore. Think of the bald eagle, right? Like back in the 90s, we were plagued with this information about how, you know, critically endangered bald eagles were. You know, their eggshells were too thin. and they weren't able to reproduce successfully.

And now bald eagles are soaring all over the place. I mean, you can go to parts of New York City and possibly spot an eagle. It's really, really incredible, and we've had a lot of success. What is the actual policy that is most helpful here? Is it just don't kill them or stay out of their territory or something else? Yeah, you know, it depends. Typical science response. It depends on the region.

it depends on the dynamics of the area. It depends on the species. So definitely the Endangered Species Act and the Endangered Species List has been tremendously important, right? So that's a huge piece of legislation that often, and I'm oversimplifying, but it'll often say, okay, anywhere where this species is found is protected area. It also means you can't hunt this species for the most part, right? If it's on the endangered species list, it can't be hunted. And that is a huge way.

It probably sounds really obvious, but it's a really great way to protect species. I mean, many of these species on the list have become critically endangered because of overhunting. But also habitat destruction. So if there's a forest that we want to turn into, a ski resort, but there's some type of endangered species that lives in that area, we're not going to be able to do as much development or sometimes any development in those areas. But also there's a lot of kind of tradeoffs for people and the economy that need to happen. So if I take the Louisiana Black Bear as an example, down south, the government actually started paying agricultural workers, so farm owners, to not farm on their land and to allow the forest to regenerate in those areas for as long as the Louisiana Black Bear was listed. And it worked. So again, these people weren't, you know, losing money, losing their livelihoods.

They were actually getting paid as if they were farming actively. They were also, you know, just letting, they weren't doing active restoration of the forest, but they were just letting their land do whatever it does naturally, leaving bears alone, not hunting them, and they were able to rebound. I did a wonderful podcast a while ago now with Joe Walston, who was a conservationist. And he actually had a weirdly optimistic take that as human beings move into more and more dense urban environments, it'll become easier and

easier to actually preserve large amounts of natural habitats for wildlife and for different kind of species. So he puts it in the language of if we get past the bottleneck where we're killing off species too quickly, we can imagine a future equilibrium

where we live in harmony with them. Do you think that's a realistic kind of prospect? I absolutely do. And, you know, I like talking about it in a kind of different way because I fell into conservation biology and wildlife ecology as an urban dwelling person. I've always lived in a big city. I was born in big cities. I never recreated in nature for fun until it became part of my career. And so often people ask me like, oh, gosh, how can you live in New York City? How can you live in Washington, D.C.? And I'm so happy to be able to give the response. like, well, it's better for the environment in a lot of ways. So urbanization, you know, has been, you know, there's been some metrics developed to

suggest that the more urbanized we become as a human society around the globe, the more wild area is able to flourish. And so it's a great idea. There's, what I find problematic is the way many conservationists, and I'm not mentioning your guest on the show, but the way a lot of conservation is kind of will gloss over the social implications for it, right? And a lot of the kind of ethics about people who may choose to live rurally or especially, you know, particularly tribal lifestyles and not want to be urban. So we don't want to necessarily suggest people like that are a problem or part of the problem. Sure.

But if, you know, if people opt into living an urban lifestyle, if an urban lifestyle is rewarding for them, like there's enough job opportunity, you know, like we can kind of solve poverty in cities, it offers so much opportunity for conservation to work and fairly quickly, You know, just kind of like getting off the land pretty quickly shows that nature is able to respond really, really well. And it could be what saves the planet. When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide.

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used to having a lot of visitors, and bears are now coming out of hibernation, you know, in parts of the mountains, to no visitors, you know? So mother bears are able to kind of just be free with their cubs and just use all different parts of the forest that they weren't able to before. All the animals are so happy right now.

Maybe not the tiger in the Bronx Zoo who got coronavirus, but all the other ones are. One of the things that Joe Wilson did mention is that historically, almost all of the great conservationists and environmentalists came from cities. You know, those are the ones who sort of feel the danger of the landscape around them disappearing more intently, I guess, something like that. That's so interesting. I did not know that, and that makes me feel way better about my self. Yeah, not just you. Not just you, Ray. But there's this

a big set of questions about how, regardless of whether we're in cities or in the country, how human beings should interact with these great animals, right, with whether it's lions or bears or whatever. Should we, in your estimation, should we sort of try to rope them off, keep them apart and, you know, leave them alone? Or will there always be these kind of overlap zones where there's the occasional black bear taking a dip in someone's pool in their backyard? Yeah, this is a complex question, and I have strong opinions about it. And I really, you know, I guess I will start by saying that it's so important to me that humans acknowledge where we are and what land we're on, right? So even if we are preaching that we should, you know, move towards more urbanization, you know, understanding that,

like right now I'm in Washington, D.C., like understanding that before this was a big city, this was a place with bears and lions and wolves and, you know, a whole wildlife community. So when we do see a lot of these animals kind of showing back up as their population sizes increase, as we see them like in the, you know, ex-urban spaces and the suburban spaces on the edges of towns and cities, to really understand that that is naturally and historically where they were meant to be. The other thing I'll say is that as long as we're... responsible. I think humans have a huge responsibility towards promoting human wildlife coexistence. Bears are a great example to use when we talk about this because humans attract bears to where we are.

If we weren't barbecuing on our backyards, if we weren't, you know, throwing out trash, if we weren't leaving our dog food, you know, in the dish on the porch, bears that can smell, you know, sense, from over a mile away wouldn't necessarily be interested in coming onto, you know, the edge of town to dig in your trash. So the more responsible people can be at eliminating attractants to wildlife, again, it could be bears, but it could also be raccoons. It could be, you know, the coyotes. It could be the deer, right? Like if you plant a yummy garden, you can't necessarily be super upset that, you know, some herbivore wants to come and eat it, right? Like you were creating, um, you're creating, um, human food resources in a place that is easily accessible to an animal.

So the more responsible we can be, the less selfish we can be, I think the easier will find coexistence. And I think the easier will find living with increased population sizes of wild animals. You know, I often give talks about, you know, human-bear coexistence in the places where I do my research. And I'll have people come up to me afterwards and say, you know, oh, you know, I, you know, I I have a bear-proof garbage can. I make sure to be really responsible in this way and this way.

But, you know, I still have bears in my backyard. And I'll say things like, you know, well, do you, you know, do you have a bird feeder? You know, do you have a, what do they call it, like a fountain, a little gurgling water fountain in your backyard? You know, things like that are still, you know, resources that bears need. And especially as we're adding in the completely. complexity of climate change, for example, where that's skewing, you know, when resources are available and the predictive nature of that, you know, these animals are going to go for the easiest option, especially in places that are their ancestral homes.

Yeah. The other thing I'll say is that, you know, it is everybody's goal, myself included, to have a vacation home somewhere. So as urban as we want to be, you know, when we are building our vacation homes and our vacation spaces in these beautiful areas with gorgeous mountains and beautiful forest, you know, we're encroaching on wildlife habitat. And so that has to come with the acknowledgement that, you know, bears might be there too. Well, and also the acknowledgement that they are legitimately dangerous, right? You know, we want them to survive and flourish, et cetera. And if we are going to have a

world where there are overlapping regions, then do we need to do at least the people who, frequent those overlapping regions need to be better educated in how to get along on a day-to-day basis or literally what you do when you stumble across one while hiking? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, safety is super, super important. And again, it speaks to coexistence. I love, I just, I can't say enough good things about bears. I love using them as an example. Again, when we talk about safety, because they're actually a really non-aggressive species, if you talk about black bears, right? Like black bears don't have a whole bunch of fear, but they also don't want any problems, you know, a lot of carnivores, like we were saying before, they don't

want to fight. They are not interested in expending their energy on fighting. They'd much rather rest, relax, get a meal, hang out. And so it really takes a lot of triggers for a black bear, for a brown bear, for, you know, for a mountain lion, for a wolf, to attend. And, you know, you. You really have to be provoking them. So just making sure that you can make your presence known. If you come into contact with a bear, you back off, you look, you know, you look away so you don't make eye contact with the animal because that can be seen as aggressive. You know, you look at its feet. You look above its head so you're not making that eye contact. You slowly back off. If you, if you are hiking, I always recommend bear spray. Bear spray,

is just a great deterrent because it's, you know, it's pepper spray essentially, and it is extremely irritating to the eyes, your eyes included. And so it is just a great way to kind of create a barrier between you and the animal. So the animal says, okay, I don't want any kinds of problems here, and you're able to just, you know, calmly make your escape. I mean, I always see these rules or instructions for what you see when you encounter bears, and they seem completely different if it's a brown bear or a black bear, or black bear or a grizzly bear,

and there's zero chance I'm going to remember what to do, depending on what kind of bear it is. So the advice you just gave was pretty universal, you think? It's pretty universal. And again, like, what you're saying is that there is really different advice for whether you are encountering a bear or whether you are being attacked by a bear. So if you're being attacked by a bear,

there are like kind of different sets of advice or what to do. If it's a black bear, you're encouraged to fight it. it off. If it is a grizzly bear, you're encouraged to, like, ball yourself into a little ball and play dead until it is done messing with you. If it's a polar bear, I'm sorry, you might not make it. But, but again, the advice for if you are, you know, on a hike and you see, you know, 30 feet ahead of you is a bear, that is when you stop in your tracks, you know, make yourself look either really big or really small, back away, don't make eye contact, and just slowly leave. Make sure that you position yourself as not a threat to the animal, not interested in the animal.

Okay. Okay. Very good. That's good to know. I did have a couple of extra little science questions just about what we've learned from your studies of the bears. I mean, we can basically study them in space and in time. It seems to me that they're pretty sparsely distributed, right? Like there's not, like you said, had big bear cities. Is there some knowledge of how they find each other? You know, dating is hard enough in the big city for human beings with all the sort of apps. Like, is there a procedure by which bears sort of do socialize on those rare occasions? Yeah. So in terms of mating, they smell each other, you know, so female bears make sure to mark their scent. Male bears, make sure to follow that scent. And so they actually just, you know, they have such an incredible sense of smell that they smell

each other from really, really far away, meet up at the right times, and then, you know, say goodbye forever. Okay. And the only times that we might see bears congregate in the same area is if there is some common resource that they don't need to fight over. So again, like if you just think of those classic, you know, videos you might see on YouTube or on, you know, National Geographic of bears, you know, at a river with spawning salmon, you and you'll see a number of bears altogether.

They're not fighting over, you know, one salmon. There is so many to go around that they will congregate at the same time each day, get their salmon, and then, again, be in very separate places for the rest of the day. That's right. And, I mean, we are here, among other things, to mention that there is a National Geographic Special coming out this week as the same week that this podcast is going to be released, called Born Wild, The Next Generation, and you'll be in it, and people can see exactly those images that you say,

the bears hunting and hanging out and so forth. Yeah, and the great thing about this show that's coming out, and I can't wait to see what my colleagues were up to, the other explorers all over the world who are going to be featured in this show, is that, you know, as much as I work with sedated bears when I have my hands on them, we're actually, we filmed this in the winter when we were doing a Bear Den survey, so I'm actually working with newborn cubs.

And so we never give any kind of, you know, any kind of drugs to cubs when they're that little. So we're actually seeing awake bears, active, adorable cutie pie, little baby animals who have never seen the light of day before. We take them out of the den for, you know, 10 minutes, just enough time for us to weigh them, measure them, you know, sex them and check their overall health before we put them back with mom. So it's an amazing glimpse into kind of the secret life of bears, but also the secret life of bear biologists. and I can't wait for people to see it. Are the bears so antisocial that it's not even worth sort of studying their social networks? Like, do bears have, you know, friends and enemies and nemesies and frenemies and stuff like that? Or do they just like just keep away from the other bears?

Yeah, they really, I mean, they're antisocial, and people hate it when I say that. I think it brings a lot of disappointment, you know? Again, because we're kind of, we as humans are socialized to believe that they are just, like, friendly and sweet. and, you know, always out together, and they're the protagonists of all of our stories. But really, they don't, you know, if they've passed by a fox in the forest, they're not stopping to say hi. They just keep it moving. But you have also, this is a good segue, because you've also done research in Africa on big cats, right?

Lions in particular? Yes, yeah, African lions. And their sociability strategies are completely different, which, you know, still, I still am waiting for the grand unified theory of this, but meanwhile, let's, you know, collect all the data and figure out in what way they are different in their sociability. Yeah, they are so, so different. The studies that I always did were very similar to how I was studying bears, so I was looking less at their behavior and more at their movement patterns. So in my studies of African Lions, I was again, you know, capturing them, putting a GPS collar

on, you know, one or two members of the pride, and really looking at how they're using the landscape and what landscapes they're using. So if you think of a huge African savanna, a lot of us might want to think that lions are using every square inch of that savanna. But it's not true. There's actually parts of the savanna that they completely avoid,

parts that they use all the time, and parts that they just pass through. So my work has always been to just understand their movement, which helps us understand their ecology, and especially how we can protect the most important areas for those lions. and if any kind of landscape development is needed for the human economy, where we can best fit that in in order to still protect lion habitat.

Yeah, I mean, I understand why for conservation and ecology purposes, you want to know where they spend their time. But as the physicist, I want to know why they spend their time in certain places. You know, I'm sure I'm asking a lot of questions to which the answer is just not known. But like, do we understand why lions enjoy hanging out in certain regions and just pass right by others or avoid them entirely? Yeah, I mean, we have baseline understandings, and again, every region is different, right? So there is, I actually have a colleague who is right now hypothesizing that there's something about the soil types of different parts of the savannah versus other parts that might actually be driving some of this habitat selection preference. And it's a, you know, it's a big question, but, you know, that's the cool thing about science and the cool thing about ecologists is that one question leads us to another to another. You know, if I were to be, you know, if I were to be a big question, you know, it's a big question. You know, if I were to be a big question, you know, it's a big question. You know, you know, it's a big question, you know, you know, super general. Of course, it's all about food resources and water resources, you know, the dry parts of the

savannah where there's no fresh water, they're going to avoid those areas because they're, you know, there's no herbivores going to the watering holes. And so they have to go farther to look for food. But it can be more complex and it can also be seasonal, right? So in certain seasons, lines are over here, in certain seasons lines seem to be more all over the place. You know, it really depends. And we see that line movement and behavior might be different in, you know, parts of South Africa versus parts of East Africa versus parts of Central Africa. So that's what I love about ecology is that we have some kind of basic baseline information that we can generalize to an entire species. But if you take, you know, one population, one pride, you can actually really dig in and see some, some differences

that then make you question everything. Well, I keep coming back to this social network question, because you just mentioned differences, and even though there are, you studied lions, but there's other kinds of big cats. And as far as my meekar understanding goes, their social networks are just entirely different, right? There are also very antisocial cats as well as very social ones. Oh, yes, absolutely. So, you know, if we hop to a different continent, we can look at tigers, right, that are not in these big prides. We could hop to North America and look at mountain lions, which are solidations. or we could even stay in Africa where we're talking about African lions and look at leopards, right,

which are on their own unless we're talking about a female. So I think it's just truly, truly fascinating. And I have never studied big cats other than lions. So I am not as much of an expert. But it is so fascinating to me how, you know, these animal species that could have so much in common and a lot of ways do actually behave so, so differently from each other. Yeah. There's a lot of contingency and randomness

in the evolutionary history that means that some things are selected for because they work or don't, but a lot of things just might be accidents. There might not be a reason why, right? Yeah, you know, that's one of the things that I love so much about learning about evolution and how it relates to ecology

is that so much is random, right? I mean, when I was a student, I actually studied what we call the neutral theory of evolution, which is, you know, just basically questioning, well, what if all of this is just happening at complete random? And it's a great way to question some of the patterns or things that we think are patterns that we see in the nature community, you know, like, why is this species social and this species isn't? You know, we think we can identify some reasons, but it could have just arisen randomly and it just works for now and we'll see how it continues

in the future. But again, to me, that is a way to emphasize why we need conservation, because we want to answer some of these questions in the future. We can't do it if we don't have these animals. Is there, so just a last question. What do you see as your hope for future end goal, your equilibrium? Like, how should we imagine living in harmony, maybe too much, but at least, you know, in a mutually beneficial equilibrium with the big predatory. that we're talking about today? Yeah, you know, when I think about what I see as the future of conservation, I often kind of surprise people because I bring in a lot of human social issues.

So I truly think that conservation cannot be successful, wildlife conservation cannot be successful unless we eliminate poverty from human societies. So so much of what we see as a threat to conservation, especially at local and regional scales is due in part to, you know, the prevalence of poverty in different places. So when I think of the future of conservation, I think about, you know, equity for communities. I think about economic infrastructure that can help alleviate or hopefully eliminate poverty so that we can really have humans in a good enough place so that we can, you know, have the best thinkers and the best minds and the best strategies available to protect nature and allow nature to thrive.

That's a good thing I think that we should all shoot for. Raywin Grant, thanks so much for being on the Minescape podcast. Thank you for having me, Sean. This was fun. Deadlines move. Plans change. And sometimes opportunities pop up out of nowhere. When you need branded gear fast, Four Imprint is ready to deliver. Four Imprint offers hundreds of promotional products in their 24-hour category, everything from custom apparel, bags and drinkware to writing tools, trade show staples, and high-tech gear. At 4-imprint, it's not just about speed. It's about doing it right. Your logo is printed with precision. Your order is packed with care and it all ships out fast. And with their 360-degree guarantee, you can be confident it'll show up right on time, just the way you planned it. That's the

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