Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Brown Bears

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why brown bears are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Brown bears known for being grizzly. Famous for being brownie. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why brown bears are secretly incredibly fascinating. There folks, hey there's their syphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of podcast, All About Why Being Alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmetter, and they're not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden.

Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of brown bears? Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me. Red bird, red bird, what do you? Okay, I'll stop that. But yeah, no, I like them.

I like a bear. Now next week's show has to be about red birds. That's going to be hard. Yeah. Hungry caterpillars. What's secretly incredibly fascinating about catapur? pillars with an appetite. My favorite thing about brown bears, and maybe we'll cover this, I don't know. Alex is very coy about his notes. He never shares them with me. Secrets. Secrets.

But I do know that there's like the fattest bear competition every year. It looks at brown bears specifically to see how chunked up they're getting because they get real chunky. I know that they're the chunkiest of the bears. So grizzly bear and brown bears are strictly speaking the same species, but they live in different places and their diets different. So brown bears tend to be a chunkier, a hunky chunky because of all the salmon that they eat. Every year around a salmon, salmon eating season, you can vote for your favorite chunky bear. And I'm a California native. of so I've seen a few brown bears in my day. Oh, like out and about?

Cool. Out and about. I mean, I went to national parks. Like, I think in the sequoias is where I've seen most of them. That's cool because the zoo I gave tours at, Brookfield Zoo in Illinois. That's the only place I've seen brown bears in person at other zoos. But I've never seen one in any way on the loose even it's from, you know, hundreds of feet away at a park. They would just go to the zoo with a big shopping cart and they start, like, grabbing zebras and whatnot bees.

I guess I don't know why I said bees. Bears don't eat bees. They eat honey. I'm just like, bears eat bees. They probably do incidentally when they eat beehives. But, you know, anyways. Yeah, a spoiler, they do. They eat bees and the larvae. They love the protein. Yeah. But they would, I guess, like, they probably wouldn't go shopping for bees. Or maybe they would. You know what? I don't know. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to shut up right now and let Alex start the show.

Now I'm imagining if you're a bear at the store, bees are probably one of those staples where it's hard to remember if you have enough. Yeah. Like for us, it's eggs. We're always like, how many eggs do I possess? And then I get a dozen why I don't eat it. And I'm like, now I have 30 eggs. Okay. Trying to make a bee for Tata.

And I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, and of course, I hope folks know about Katie's wonderful podcast creature feature. Yeah. So I do the research for this show. So she probably knows a lot about brown bears offhand, and I've piled up a bunch of things. We'll talk more about Fat Bear Week, which is usually in September of each year and a lot of other stuff too. I actually know surprisingly little about brown bears.

So I'll either remember stuff as we're talking or I'll learn things, which is always nice to learn stuff. Ah, everyone feels that way listening to the show, too. And thank you to Ducup Bear on the Discord for the suggestion of just bears broadly. Nepotism. Got support from James and Maas, Cleom. I think even, I forget what cartoon character it is, but I think his avatar on the Discord is a brown furred bear. Right, right. But they just suggested bears, which is great.

And also, that's probably about eight episodes as I dug into it. Seems like you're in the pocket of Big Bear. And I don't mean the ski area. Gosh, I wish I could be. I've never been there. When I lived in LA, people would just talk about big bear and I'd be like, yeah, it sounds like heaven, but I'm busy and tired. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's a beautiful forest, snow.

Sounds really good. Yeah. But I basically, of the bear species, I picked brown bears because I feel like that's, like, default, sort of. Yeah. Like a brown bear is a bear. Bear. That's the most beariest bearer that you could bear. And that's basically my relationship to them is that's a bear bear bearer.

But we have so much to dig into about them. And folks, if you want to hear about the other seven bear species, suggest any of them on Discord and our polls, especially you members who come through on that are the best. You pick awesome topics every week you do. Let me see if I can name all seven. There's the polar bear. There's the brown slash grizzly bear. There's black bears. There's pandas, obviously.

Sun bears? Yeah. Oh, gosh. All right. All right. I'm starting to run out. I know there's two more. There, other than sun bears, there's, oh, God.

Alex. Save me, Alex. And I'm lucky because those other two were also at the zoo I gave tours of. There's the sloth bear and the spectacled bear. Oh, my gosh. Yes. And then technically there's two different species of black bears. There's a North American one and an Asian one.

That's how you get eight. Ooh. Oh, nice. That's pretty much it. And then koalas are not included. Red pandas are not included. There's a few others that people kind of lump them. Not bears.

Quallas are marsupules. Red pandas are, I think, more closely related to, like, raccoons. They are. Yeah. The giant panda and the red panda, just humans decided those are similar. but they're quite different. Yeah. But yeah, so those are the eight bear types,

and brown bears feel very default to me of those, and are also even more amazing than I expected. It's really nice. And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called stats. Doo do do do do do.

Ah, numbers, numbers. Do do do do do. You are my syphilopolis. and you've got me counting you. Nice. Maybe that was too high. We'll see how that. No, that was good.

No, that was good. That was good. You just auto-tune it a little bit. And then you'll, you know, you'll sound like Michel Boubley. And by the way, thank you to Serial Thrawn on the Discord for that stat song. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and whack-in bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com.

But the first number here is more than a dozen species. Because in the past, scientists and taxonomists thought the world was full of more than a dozen different separate bear species that are now considered subspecies of brown bears. And there's really just one main brown bear species. So like grizzlies are the same as Kodiaks or the same as the others at a top level way. Like my understanding of it is if you took a bear cub and you transplanted that bear cub to these. different environments where these bear populations are. They would probably start to, because of the diet, they would behave and look like where they are transplanted to. The genetic differences at most could be like a subspecies situation, but at most. Yeah, and that also speaks to something we'll

get into a lot, which is how adaptable and kind of changeable these brown bears are. Like they're total omnivores, they really shift with their environment for being so large and full of claws and teeth. They are really adaptable to the whole northern hemisphere of the world. Right. Well, they'll eat pretty much anything. Yeah. We think of them as just devouring meaty prey, but they'll eat kind of anything. And a lot of the ones that live in places without much meaty prey, just don't do that. Everything from fruits to insects to fungus and roots. They can live on that instead. Yeah, berries. Yeah, bears with berries. That's why they call them berries.

Don't check, don't fact check me on that. Yeah, and so taxonomy is essentially made up by people. It's driven by real genetics. But according to the San Diego Zoo, we're only a few decades into seeing all these different grizzlies and Eurasian brown bears and various other brown bears as one species. and in the past scientists at one point claimed North America on its own had 86 different bear species. Wow. Which are now all considered just brown bears, not even the ones that are black bears and other things. Right.

Yeah, it's just they like different coats, different. Sometimes like their coats can be sort of different colors as well, which can add to the confusion. So, yeah, but, yeah, it's, but, you know, I mean, horses, right? horses come in different colors and for the most part they're just horses yeah they're pretty much all one of the species that we domesticated and that's that yeah yes and another number here is three previously four three previously four that's like a whole sentence Alex that's not just a number I just wanted to say flag on the play yellow card yeah potential second yellow card I'm out Yeah.

That, the brown bears live on three continents and used to live on a fourth as well. I didn't know how widespread they've been across the whole northern hemisphere, especially before there were more people on Earth. For example, the grizzly bear, and we call it grizzly because that word means like gray, like sprinkled or streaked with gray, like a grizzled old man, you know, grizzled. Right. We could call them salt and pepper bears. It'd be a little nicer, I think.

Yeah, that'd be nice. Yeah, you almost want to say silver fox, but that sounds like a fox. Right. And then they're really lost. A little confusing. What's now 18 different Western U.S. states used to have grizzly bears. Now they're mostly in far northern regions of North America and rewilding a bit. But meanwhile, there is another subspecies that was endemic to what's now Mexico, but has been driven out.

But you've got grizzlies in North America, Mexican, ones formerly. Meanwhile, at least five subspecies of the Eurasian brown bear, which are all usually smaller than grizzlies, and then a bunch of other super specific tiny groups. Like, in general, brown bears, we think there's a few hundred thousand in the world. But one number here is about 50 individuals in the wild. That's how many brown bears are in a super specific subspecies in central Italy in the mountains. Whoa. Yeah, I was aware that we had. bear. I didn't realize that they were, they're just the same brown bears. Yeah, they are apparently some of the smallest in the world, and we'll talk more about them later,

but people either call them marcican bears or apennine bears, because they're in the apennines, those mountains of central Italy. But there's only about 50 wild individuals. And, you know, if you go down to the subspecies level, there's many extremely endangered brown bears. And that's part of why you see them in zoos. Right. I think that I think I've seen sort of people trying to bring awareness to the bear situation when I'm walking around and there's like people trying to get you interested in a cause and they'll start talking to me in Italian about bear stuff. And I, you know, my Italian's like just kind of okay. Like maybe not good enough to completely understand whether they're saying that like we want to save the bears or we want to eat the bears, not a hundred

percent sure. Pretty sure they want to save the bears. I hope so, yeah. And we'll also talk about people who live near these bears seem to be protecting them and comfortable with them. It's nice. Yeah. But other groups may be less protected, especially because it's just a totally different

environment. Apparently there's about 40 individuals in a desert adapted brown bear in the gobi desert. There's another subspecies we can't even count because it lives in remote regions of Tibet in the Himalayan mountains. And because of the fur color, they're either called Tibetan brown bears or Tibetan blue bears. Like that's how slightly different the pigmentation is. I assume it's not like a real blue-blue. Yeah, I looked it up. I think they should just be called brown bears.

It's not like the dog bluey or something. It's really pretty brown. Well, I don't think it, I don't really think there's any mammal that looks like the dog bluey, Alexander. But I think. Oh, I can tell you're serious. Sing your full. Alexander J. Schmidt. I don't actually know.

I don't think that's your middle name. But, no, I'm looking at the Tibetan blueberry. It's Jingleheimer. It's, yeah, J for Jigleheimer. John J. Yeah, yeah, Alexander Jacob, Jingleheimer, J. J. I'm looking at the Tibetan blueberry.

No, I can actually see why it's called. I respectfully disagree. I do see why it's called a blue. Because it's just like the coat is like a little, it's like a mixture of a reddish brown and black, which from a certain angle gives it a bluish hue. But, you know, it's obviously not blue. Yeah, it's like relative to other really mammals all over the world.

It's relatively blue, yeah. This one I'm looking at has a cool little beard, so that's fun. Yeah, there's all sorts of different. furs for brown bears, like you said, and one with very pale fur is called the Syrian brown bear. There's now too many people in what's now Syria for them to live there, but they're still in mountainous West Asia. And then other places the subspecies has been extirpated. Like in Mexico, also in England, according to the BBC, there's a long-running debate over

when brown bears were extirpated in England. Could have been 3,000 years ago, could have been as recent as 1,500 years ago. And part of the confusion is that when Britain was a Roman province, the Romans brought circus bears. And so maybe some of those got out and kind of reintroduced bears for a bit. It's hard to tell with the records. Yeah. That's interesting. Was it just like people hunting them or them being pushed out by competition?

It seems like both, but the biggest thing is just humans, like both that humans hunted them and also humans were afraid of them. Right. Makes, yeah. I mean, yeah, bears are scary. But also, sometimes they're not like this picture I just sent you of a Tibetan bear sitting on his bum, holding his little feats with his hands. Yeah. And he has such a pale kind of collar that not all of them do. They vary so much.

Yeah. And there also used to be a subspecies in the Atlas Mountains, which are in northwest Africa. And so that's a fourth continent that used to have brown bears. they, before the human population was bigger, they lived pretty much all over the northern hemisphere. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, like, we probably saw them as direct threats, perhaps in a lot of situations

correctly so. As cool and cute as bears are, they are definitely dangerous in terms of they can move extremely fast. Like, people look at a bear and they think that's sort of a lumbering, slow creature, but they can really book it when they have. have a mind too. And yeah, they can rip you to shreds. They don't generally do that, but they definitely can and they will sometimes. So, you know. Exactly. It's all the above. Like, they are such killing machines if they want to be. And also, I think my first ever favorite TikTok video to

watch was just a brown bear walking on its hind legs. And the soundtrack was that one cute song that's like, bong, bop, bong, bop bong. Yeah. Like, hey, hey, like, they're really funny that way, too. And brown bears were so widespread in the Northern Hemisphere. They borderline named part of it. Because especially like modern English, deriving things from Latin and from Greek, we got words for brown bears that have become the words for the Arctic. The scientific name for brown bears is Ursus Arctos.

Ursus is a Latin word meaning bear, arctose is a Greek word meaning bear. And the progression is fuzzy, but in some way that Greek arctose spread from being a name for bears to a name for the northern part of the northern hemisphere, just because this is such a charismatic megafauna of the whole hemisphere. And so this one topic, there's an amazing variety of subspecies.

And according to the U.S. National Park Service, there's a couple key traits across all the brown bears. They tend to have a larger shoulder hump than other bears and a relatively wide and dish-shaped face and relatively long claws. But other stuff like their size, coloring, diet, sleeping patterns that may not identify them versus other totally distinct bear species. And also if people heard the past sift about cinnamon, we covered a mutation in North American black bears

where some of them have brownish fur. And the nickname is Cinnamon Bears, which is cute. But some people now confuse them in the Western U.S. If you're just looking at the fur color, you might get it wrong. And with bear genetics, there's one further astounding thing about brown bears, which is takeaway number one. Brown bears are the genetic origin of polar bears. Whoa.

Cool. This is relatively new science, and it suggests that polar bears only divers. from brown bears about half a million years ago. That's not that long in evolutionary terms. Yeah, 500,000 years, we think that a like group of brown bears just went further north, adapted to marine hunting from sea ice, and then got a lot different to the point that now taxonomically they're a different species. They can, I was going to say intermarry.

That's definitely not what you say. They can interbreed though because you can have a brown bear and polar bear mixes, which is happening more and more because of climate change and the ice flows melting. That along with polar bears being able to digest vegetation are some of the clearest signs beyond our DNA research and stuff, that these are closely related very recently diverged. Right. Like polar bears are just sort of a relatively extreme subspecies. They're just like a little more different than the apennine bears or the grizzlies or something.

It is interesting because you can see how of the bears, even though brown bears and grizzly bears can be dangerous if you kind of insert yourself into their whole situation. And they can't eat people. They don't do it very often though because usually they get enough food from their environment. But polar bears actively want to eat your butt. And that's because the Arctic is much harsher, much more difficult to find food. So they'll like go people, people hunts. If they're, yeah, you know, I mean, not all the time. But yeah, they are definitely much more prone to want to eat and devour people than brown bears.

Yeah, totally. And it also seems like with both species' interest in eating humans, varies a lot individually. Yeah. Each bear, there's some that are really just comfy with us and some that really want to kill us. So you need to stay away from them. Oh, yeah. Because it might be the second thing.

But it really varies. Yeah, don't really chance it, man. It's interesting, though, because that personal preference is like, that's true of a lot of carnivore species, like with lions. Like, a lot of them are just like, yeah, I know I would prefer not to eat people. That sounds difficult. But then there have been just cases of individual. lions that are like, yeah, I want to eat some people.

And I'm going to make it my mission to eat as many people like the Savo lions, which were I think a problem with them was like they had some kind of like dental issues or some illness issue that made it hard for them to hunt furry things with tough hides. And humans are yummy and squishy like a, you know, like a grape. So. We are like grapes. Yeah. We're like ape grapes.

Ape grapes, that's right. Ape grapes. Now that should be merch, just a shirt that says you're an ape grape. Yeah. We're grape apes. Yeah. Yeah. And so stay away from these.

But while you observe them from a distance, this just totally changes my entire concept of, especially one of the most popular bears. Like we talked about the eight bear species. Polar bears are arguably the most popular along with pandas. Like just like if a kid has a favorite animal and it's a bear, it's probably one of those. But all this time, we're learning, especially from recent studies, I'm going to link off to work by scientists at UC Santa Cruz, the University at Buffalo, Texas Tech, and the University of Oulu in Finland.

And they've done a lot of genetic studies of polar bears and found out that it's a relatively recent shift from brown bears. That's really interesting. Yeah. And it kind of checks out looking especially at their diets because brown bears will eat fish, like especially the fat bears you talked about in Alaska. They have a bunch of salmon, so they eat them. And we think around 500,000 years ago at most 600,000, there was one population of brown bears

in the northern hemisphere that just went further north. north than others and said, oh, we have all this space if we go north, there's sea ice that we can use as a hunting platform. And so unlike arguably most other brown bears living on fruit, honey, insects, vegetation, roots, mushrooms, these specific brown bears became hyper carnivores, more than 70% of their diet as aquatic prey. Yeah. And so over the next half million years of using sea ice as platforms to catch fish and seals and other marine life, then they gradually adapted to have bigger paws and swim greater distances and then have less pigment in their fur.

That's so interesting, yeah. It's weird to think of. I really just think of polar bears as this separate thing that's always been separate. But on evolutionary scale, they're really not. No, I mean, that kind of makes sense, right? They live, the populations live close enough that you have natural hybrids. and you know they just they do look different though like enough different especially in the face polar bears have longer they're bigger they have longer bodies their faces are more elongated

all these things that have made them better swimmers more adept for a semi-aquatic polar habitat but yeah it's pretty wild to be honest with you like if i you know like my personal preference between the bears is I like brown bears better than polar bears polar bears like i don't know i look into their eyes and i see uh the soulless eyes of a doll looking back at me doll's eyes a doll's eyes uh and uh yeah they they are they are they're scarier to me than brown bears i mean they're both obviously i'm smart enough to not want to mess with either not going to like you know try to say hey to a brown bear and like pal around but uh yeah it's uh you know between the aquaticness and the eyes and the ferocity polar bears have a shark energy for sure yeah yeah it's the tiny black eyes and

the massive stature and uh yeah just pretty much everything about them they're not to me they're beautiful but they're not cute yeah totally totally even the cub the cub is like where it starts to be cute as polar bear. The Cubs are cute. Yeah, polar bear Cubs are cute. Yeah, yeah. But that's kind of all Cubs too. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, and very fast sports factoid, it turns out the Chicago Bears football team first started playing in Chicago at the same field as the Chicago Cubs baseball team that already existed. So they picked the name Chicago Bears because that felt like more football and aggressive but otherwise related to the Cubs. Yeah. But, I mean, like the Cubs is the last thing you see before you get ripped to shreds. So I don't know. Right.

Because mom's behind you. Because mom's behind you. Yeah. I saw a mother, brown bear and her cub in Sequoia. Oh. Yeah. I mean,

first, it was very cute. They were, it was also a little scary because it was like, I hope there's not like another cub secretly somewhere behind me. But yeah, they were, they're in your backpack.

Ressling around getting my candy bars. But they were, they were a good. distance away so it was safe to look at them because they were like you know they were far away enough that I felt safe but it was still it was pretty neat and it was very cute because the little baby was watching the mother rip open bark from trees to presumably get at like the termites and ants in there and he was like he would watch his mother do it and then try it out himself and he was much worse at it than she was, but it was very cute to watch him, like, actively learning from her.

Yeah. Any baby of a species being bad at stuff is the best. Yeah. It's very cute. And the polar bears and brown bears, part of why we know that they are evolutionarily close is that we've been seeing them mate together. Like, as Katie said in modern times, there's been an increase of them mating in the wild because polar bears and brown bears have needed to kind of merge.

their habitats. And then there's a story on the pastiff about teddy bears where teddy bears were kind of parallel invented in the U.S. and Germany. The German toy designers based them on hybrid bears at their local zoo. Some German zoos had had polar bears and brown bears breed together on purpose. And that ends up with kind of a tan colored bear. That's why a lot of teddy bears are tan in a way that's rare in nature. And then also most of those hybrids are able to reproduce too.

Like these are close enough genetically that kind of paved the way for them to still make what some people call a Pizzley, Polar Bear Grizzly, into its own animal that can kind of reproduce and be a thing. Pizzley has never sat right with me. The name, I don't know. You know, it sounds like, it sounds like a word you would like do, like if you're trying to be cute about having pissed your pants. Like I did a Pizzley in my pants. So I don't really love Groller I've heard Is a little bit more intimidating

It sounds like growling So yeah sure Yeah whereas like Oh I'm a Pizzly bear I'm a Pizzley Twizzley bear Yeah it doesn't Doesn't sound super intimidating Yeah it does not

Yeah And another sign that these are closely related As we are also starting to see Some polar bear subgroups Adapt a little bit to the different climates they're in partly because of human climate change. I'm going to link to popular mechanics for a 2025 study at the University of East Anglia. They found that the polar bears in northern Greenlands are somewhat genetically different

from the polar bears in southern Greenlands, but in their genes for heat stress and aging and metabolism because those places are becoming kind of different as the earth heats up. Is that just because of sort of them evolving or have they been interbreeding with other bear populations? It seems to be more evolving and adapting. I see. And more in the past, there was more interbreeding, though. And these recent studies of polar bears diverging from brown bears, it's led scientists to compare it to the way homo sapiens and Neanderthals continued interbreeding and sharing genes. It wasn't just one replaced the other. Right. Honestly, also, Neanderthals get a bad rap they were not necessarily not in tell like they were they weren't dumb or whatever no no they were

very intelligent in fact like in a lot of ways they see it seemed like neanderthals should probably have been the more dominant species but like there's some theories that they were just like too nice ah that'll do it so that's why we outcompeted them they were too nice and we were like humans were better at deception that that's like a theory of why we outcompeted them but not because said they were dumb. Like they were very smart. Yeah, yeah. And that like ongoing exchange of genes and mating and all sorts of things, it happened until very recently on a large scale between brown bears and polar bears.

We think the trade of genes went back and forth even as polar bears diverged enough to make sense as a separate species taxonomically. But it's all so recent. I just thought polar bears were as old of a species as brown bears and other things. I don't know. It seems like they would be right because they're like from what feels like this like ancient untouched area of the Arctic. But, uh, but no. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So new. And also with like friendliness especially that gets us into takeaway number two. Brown bears are dangerous animals, which share two specific traits with Winnie the Pooh sometimes. Like they're a little like Winnie the Pooh in terms of really. really, really loving honey. That's not just a stereotype. And also a few individuals peacefully coexist with humans for the most part.

So stay away from them. But there's like two ways that's kind of funny. And none of them wear pants. You can get a shirt. Like what Disney has taught me is you can get a shirt on a bear, but never pants. Never pants on a bear. Right. And only an expert should bring a red t-shirt to a brown bear.

Yeah. Right. No, exactly. But like in every iteration of bears that are clothed in Disney stuff, like I don't think I've ever seen one with pants because there's many of the poo, pantsless, there's Little John from the animated Robin Hood, no pants. True.

Right. Yeah, I mean, like they're either fully nude or the shirt, but no pants. They're Donald ducking it, always. There's two things about brown bears loving honey and getting along with us. I'm going to link to basically a whole library of modern brown bear stories. Smithsonian Magazine, The Guardian, Popular Mechanics, J.Store Daily, and the New York Times. And most of these stories are from within the past year. There's just a lot of brown bear news because when you go to the overall species level,

it's considered of least concern by conservation groups. There are a lot of brown bears out there, especially in Russia, Canada, and the state of Alaska. But we assume they're just killing machines often, especially if they have the reputation of a U.S. grizzly bear. But when you leave brown bears to their own devices, they might just focus on getting honey specifically. Right. And not hurting any of us. Yeah. I think like in the cases where brown slash grizzly bears have like attacked people, it's usually because the people have really inserted themselves into their environment in a, you know, perhaps unwise way.

Yes. But yeah. Yeah, we really, really, really need to stay away from them. It's sort of like bison. Like bison are not like mean, but don't mess with them, obviously, because then they will do bison stuff to you. It's bad. Yeah. I mean, the most horrific example, obviously, is that guy, the bear man.

Oh, the grizzly man, yeah, yeah. He just got to eat. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, both him and his girlfriend. It's really horrible. Like, I, you know, like, obviously. he made really bad decisions with respect to these bears but he felt like he had a connection with them

because he knew some of the bears that were actually pretty chill with him but then he like I think got overly confident and hung out with you know hung out with tried to approach an unfamiliar bear and it was also like during some season where the bear was like hungry and irritable and yeah just uh killed them in a really horrible way but uh yeah you don't want that's that's not a good that's that's not good for anybody the person or the bear yeah uh because they're gonna have to i mean getting mauled to death by a bear is not good i don't think that's a

hot take i agree uh but then also it's not good for the bear because then that bear is usually uh euthanized because you know you can't have a bear going around killing and people, uh, so it's bad. Don't, don't go, don't, uh, don't kiss a bear on the mouth. Don't do that. Yeah, and the human response to that, we'll talk about it in, in what's a not sad way in the next takeaway, actually. Cool. I was a real downer just then. Uh, no, because it is sad too. I'm setting it up for Alex to be a not downer. I have two different stories here of bears recently just going after honey when they're left to their own devices and not enclosed anymore. Right.

In June 2025, there's a wildlife sanctuary in Devon in the southwest of England. And also some English conservationists are trying to rewild brown bears in the country. But at this wildlife sanctuary, two sibling brown bears escaped their enclosure. Their names are Mish and Lucy. And Mish and Lucy did not try to, like, leave and go on the lamb. They just went straight into the staff areas where food is kept and specifically ate more than a week's supply of honey. in like a couple minutes. Like specifically just as soon as I have freedom, honey.

Great. What container situation was the honey? Like, were they like? Buckets. Okay, buckets. Because I was like wondering how, if it was like the honey and the little plastic bare shaped bottles if they were just sort of chugging one right after the other or what was going on with that.

They're drawn to containers that look like them. Right, right. They don't like honey even. Yeah. Yeah, they just went for that honey and then were brought back to their enclosures, no problem. Right, right. Just a quick honey jaunt. Yeah.

Even weirder example, these are wild brown bears in Romania. In August 2025, security cameras captured a couple of brown bears entering a four-star hotel. Oh, well. And the New York Times has clips of this one brown bear just like gently prying open a glass automatic door. Like it just pulls it slightly toward itself and it's super strong. So it immediately breaks it up the hinge. Alex, what do you, what kind of room service do you give an 800 pound bear checks into a hotel? I don't know, Katie.

Anything it wants. Yes. Yeah, so like apparently the couple of brown bears that went in, one of them just went into the restaurant, ate all of the honey packets. and then left the hotel. That was all it did. Oh, no. Did it, like, actually eat the plastic as well? Because that's got to be a sad time for pooping.

Yeah, I mean, that's unclear. And I feel like they would be okay. Oh, I'm sure he's okay. But because then another one drank like an entire gallon of olive oil because it thought it was going to be honey, apparently. Like, they just want the honey. Well, now that's why we've got the Italian bear population. Right. And just real loose stools, frankly. That's how it would go.

You got to go easy on the olive oil there. Yeah, and bears, it's not a stereotype. They really do love honey. It's a natural, dense source of energy, and it's delicious. And then also they eat the whole hive, like the bees and the larvae are protein and the structure of the hive just passes through or his fiber. It's not a made-up thing that bears are obsessed with honey. They really like it, especially brown bears. I mean, I bet if we didn't have such a hang-up about eating bugs, that that would be great to just have the whole hive, bees and all. Yeah, we should probably do that, yeah, if we're going to.

Spicy sky raisins. Yeah, get that for the table in the bear room service. Beyond their love of honey, there are individual brown bears. that have spent a lot of time in the same space as us without going all bloodlusts. It's not Christopher Robin with Winnie the Pooh, but you can kind of be around them. My favorite example, this is June 2025 in Lithuania. Apparently a young female brown bear wandered from living in the forest all the way into the capital city of Vilnius. Like she's going to become, you know, the next bear president.

Yeah, it's very padding. and then who doesn't elect them, you know? Yeah, sure. She was apparently within a few miles of downtown at one point. She was in backyards and highways and gardens of like close suburban Vilnius. And eventually the national government issued a permit to kill this bear. Oh, man. But the bear was so friendly and non-threatening, hunters publicly refused to do it.

Oh. And after a few days of kind of just shutting down parts of Vilnius, the bear proceeded back out into the forest and was sighted 40 miles from the city just continuing to hang out. You know, he wasn't trying to hurt anybody. Just a curious bear. Yeah. I mean, like, I don't know. I don't like, yeah, the idea of sort of just because a bear kind of wanders into our environment.

I mean, like, what, we're just always going to kill the bear. It seems like we should at least try to relocate the bear first. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And the bear relocated itself. So I'm glad that people didn't do. the government wanted to do. She's like, you can't, if you can't handle me at my barest, you don't deserve me at my

fairest. Yeah, I like that she was just kind of on a little walk. Yeah. And left again. That was it. Yeah. No, man. Like, it's a bear, like, we do that.

We go to her home and go on a little walk. Is she not allowed to come to our home and go on a little hike? Take a few photos of us. Huh? That joke is weirdly relevant to the next story here. So back in the 1950s and 1960s, Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., there was one basically celebrity brown bear because it was just extraordinarily comfortable with humans to the point that conservationists worried it would mislead the entire American public and get them killed by other brown bears. They named her Sylvia, Sylvia the brown bear. they, she is arguably the friendliest bear ever recorded.

Wow. At one point, Sylvia was so friendly. She was letting Yellowstone visitors touch the like green ear tags that she was being tracked with by staff. And they worried that they would either need to move her or at one point discussed euthanizing her. Oh my gosh. Just because like her story was so famous, they worried then, you know, hundreds and thousands

of people would get killed by other brown bears because they didn't. didn't understand. This was an outlier. Again, I don't, it doesn't sit right with me to punish the sweet, nice, friendly bears for our own problems. Exactly. And they did not euthanize her good news. But yeah, she like became nationally famous. In a time we weren't alive for, so we didn't hear about it. But like Sylvia was national news in a minor way for being just so chill, like a winnie the poo of bears. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's. It's interesting because, you know, I mean, there are a lot of stories of various dangerous animals that do, like, are surprisingly chill.

Like, even, you know, occasionally lions or crocodiles or, you know, what have you. And it's, it's, it's neat, but it also is like, please leave them alone. That doesn't mean, just because they're like unusually chill does not mean that, uh, that, uh, is going to be a good idea to like, you know, just be like, well, bears are my friend now because they are so cuddly looking. Yes, yeah, yeah, the dominant rule is stay away. And then the big exception, if there's ever been one on a population level, is that subspecies of apennine brown bears in the Italian apennine mountains. Oh, man. So you're saying I can go to one of these mountains and go hug a bear?

Is that what you're saying, Alan? No. Lawsuits, lawsuits. Apparently these Italian individuals were studied by scientists and then in a study published December 2025. They said that over thousands of years, that tiny cutoff subgroup of brown bears has genetically selected for being docile, being basically non-carnivorous, because that's what allowed them to not be killed by, you know, like Roman legionaries, like all these thousands of years. of Etruscan and Roman and Italian people running alongside them. It's a uniquely cuddly entire subspecies

because that's how you are not hunted. Right. Game recognized game and they just were like, hey, we're just going to be chill while you guys do all this weird Roman stuff. Yes. And yeah, there's even a few towns in that region.

The main one is called Petoranos Sulgesio. It's nicknamed the town that went wild. And as of 2015, they were officially government designated as bear smart as a community. They've put up electric fencing around beehives. They carefully gather fallen orchard fruit to prevent bears from overfeeding and moving in all the way. But it's considered to be, of all the towns on earth, the one where brown bears are the most comfortable just kind of walking through. And both the brown bears and the humans are cool about it.

But a lot of it's because this incredibly tiny subgroup has adapted borderline evolved to hang out with humans. that's adorable it sounds like it sounds like they're having a better time of it than like there's this recent news about like an Italian little town where there's a bunch of peacocks there

that have like more recently taken over and like over a hundred peacocks so this is in Punta Marina in northern Italy and I want to like I want to specifically go there to like watch people panicking about the peacocks, but it seems like the peacocks in this town are freaking people out more and being more disruptive than the bears. Yeah, like each animal

subgroup can really vary. The other brown bear extreme right now is in 2025, there's so many brown bears in Hokkaido in northern Japan, and they're so numerous and relatively aggressive that a prefecture governor has asked the Japanese military to intervene. Whoa. And like fight the bears. And then the other extreme is there's this Italian town where bears are essentially part of the community. That would be an amazing movie. Like the Japanese military versus bears.

Yeah. And then meanwhile, the Italian military. military fights the peacocks and the bears help or advise or something. I don't know what they would do. Right. I don't know. Like with the like what because like if the the other bears are chill here like who would ally with who discuss in the comments. Yeah. And while you take a comment break folks, we're going to take a quick break because that's that's two giant takeaways on brown bears all over the northern half of the earth. We're going to come back with a few more takeaways about surprising brown bear encounters and abilities.

We're back and Katie, we have a couple more wild takeaways about brown bear abilities, interactions, and more. The next one is takeaway number three. We are trying to protect brown bears by doing facial recognition and by not mistaking them for yeties. All right. So a couple things. Number one, this sounds just like a way for palanter and so on to,

like create a bare database so bear dissidents get tracked. Number two, how do we know that bears isn't yetis checkmate? Yeah, that's two checkmates, really. I can't believe I lost an entire tournament worth of boards. I've defeated Alexander in the marketplace of ideas. I like the one I'm your opponent. I'm Alexander. That's great. Yeah. Whenever I say Alexander, it's, It's antagonistically. Legitimately, like, when I receive any message, like texts or emails and they call me Alexander, I know it's business. It's been a great thing in my life.

Right. No, it's the same thing with Catherine. When I see, like, Catherine, I'm like, well, I've got to put on my adult face for this conversation. It's going to be about taxes or health care. What if both of our adult face is just a prop beard? Right. just more mature.

I just slowly, I put on the Carl Marx, the Carl Marx, not Carl Marx, the Marx brothers' glasses. I put on the Marx brothers' glasses with the nose and the mustache, and then a Carl Marx beard, so I'm doubly adult. We both profoundly misunderstand Marxism. We think if you dress as Karl Marx, you can't take our money. Yeah. Because no more money. Yeah.

Right. Right. my wife, please, which is not even a Marx thing. But that's what I think, that's what I think the Marxism is. Yeah, yeah. No, I get no respect. That was Engels. Engels said that. Yeah. Angles said that. So, so yeah, those two tech stories. Right. And starting with Yetis, Yeties do not exist. Oh, well, okay, spoilers. And in 2017, a team at the University at Buffalo, led by biologist Dr. Charlotte Linkvist,

they helped learn that not only do Yetis not exist, but a lot of so-called Yeti artifacts are brown bear stuff specifically. Like the main one is hair samples. People think they found the hair of Yetis. There's a lot of things in the woods. that have hair. So, you know, I don't know. Like whenever someone's like, I found a hair sample of a Yeti, it's like, yeah, I mean, there's animals, too.

Right. Yeah, and this, Ars Technica covered this. This was mainly a study of like Himalayan claims, not Bigfoot's in North America or something, although those are probably brown bear stuff too. Yeah. But Dr. Linkfist's team analyzed a big set of Yeti hairs from private collections and museums and at least one monastery. They also looked at teeth and a supposed Yeti skin a sample and a supposed femur bone from a Yeti. And after sequencing the DNA, they learned almost all of it

is from seven different brown bears. Primarily that Tibetan brown bear subspecies that's kind of bluish. So it's like a fraternity of brown bears going around tricking people into thinking that there's Yetis. I hope it's like beta, beta, beta, beta, just all bees, you know? And guess where they went to school, Alex? I don't know, Katie, where they go to school? Brown.

That's very good. Is Brown's mascot a bear? That would be appropriate. No, I don't think it is. What is it? Brown's mascot. I don't think it's... Oh, Bruno the bear.

It's a bear. UCLA, though, is the broom. ones, and it's like, which is also a brown bear, I'm pretty sure, because Bruin means something. Yeah, it's a bear. Yeah, yeah. It's a bear. Isn't it a bear?

It's an archaic word for bears, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm learning that. Brown University, there's specifically the brown bears. That's awesome. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, and then this Yeti study, it was almost all brown bear samples, and then one thing from an Asiatic black bear and one thing from a dog. But so this suggests brown bears are the source of almost all yet. etty mythology because the artifacts of it and how they look if they're on their hind legs and stuff. I think it's just brown bear observations. Like, yeah, because they can be bipedal, so that maybe is what's confusing people. And that's probably northern hemisphere wide.

So that's a key building block of learning that. Right. And then meanwhile, a whole other amazing technology is happening in Brown Bear facial recognition. And the big announcement about it, January 2026, it was a team of computer scientists collaborating with Canadian First Nations people. They announced a system called Bear ID designed to identify individual brown bears entirely by their face. And the main reason for this is we don't want to call a bear that did not attack a human by a mistake. Right. because generally most governments, communities, societies in modern times, if a bear attacks a human in any way, they order the killing of the bear. That's kind of a widespread belief.

Right. Even if the humans started it, which seems a little unfair. I agree. Yeah, that's part of it too. And the spark for this has been a few different mistaken identity issues. Apparently in Norway and July 2025, a female brown bear bit a human on the arm. Authorities ordered hunters to, to call that bear, but they lost her trail and killed another male bear by mistake. My God. And then the Norwegian government withdrew the call order because they simply couldn't be confident they'd catch the right bear. Right. That's a, this is one way bears that, uh, to get away with bear crime. Pretty much.

Yeah. And like a lot of the stories on this show, it's from less than a year ago. There's so much brown bear news all the time. And this kind of thing happens all over the northern hemisphere. or so. People in British Columbia, in Canada, especially, there was a case of not being able to catch one individual bear that was a serial human attacker. So they developed Bear ID partly in the hopes of catching just the specific bears. And apparently it's particularly hard technology to do because bear face shapes change a lot as they store up food for winter and then, you know,

consume that nutrition. It's weirdly difficult on top of facial recognition being hard in general. Yeah. Because like, yeah, they're sort of like Christian Bale levels of getting big and small. Yeah, really. It's extraordinary stuff. And speaking of them getting big and small for hibernating, whole other amazing story here. Takeaway number four. Brown Bear moms can give birth while hibernating. Yeah, that's, I wish, man. So mad about this. I know. I'm so mad about this. It really seems ideal across the whole mammal world to do it this way.

Yeah. I don't want to get into it. But one of the things that I guess I didn't fully appreciate about childbirth is it's very tiring. I was so sleepy. I kept like trying to argue with them that like if I could just take an eye closer for about five minutes, but they were like, no, you have to give birth. And I was like, but could I also just take a nap? I'm sure. I'm sure it'll be fine.

What if you didn't understand Italian well enough and you thought they were just bothering you, but they were saying there's a brown bear in the hospital. We have to flee. We have to. And you're like, leave me alone. I'm tired. Please. I'm so shriepy.

I was so shriepy. But it's just a loose friendly epon bear. So I think I think what we've learned is I got to get brother bared. I'd like to be brother bared. Oh. I haven't actually seen that movie. What? Oh, my God.

Alex, you got to watch it. It's a, it's very cute. It's a good movie. I'm sure it's great. I mean, like, the plot and everything is, like, pretty good, but, like, the biggest thing about it, like, the bear animation is fantastic. Okay. Good tip. Yeah. Yeah, I love bears. It's cute. It's a good movie. So also, like, truly speaking of pop culture, I feel like pop culture made me think a hibernating brown bear is a presumably male bear just sleeping after eating a whole lot. Right. And that is a thing. But the far more amazing things, to me is that a brown bear mom can be hibernating, barely become more conscious during the pushing out of the baby, and otherwise be in a state of extreme rest for the whole winter, even as their cubs are awake babies. Right.

It's amazing. And the cubs just like go to the nipples and nurse, right? They do. Yeah, the key sources here are a lot of digital resources. It's the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and then the Scandinavian brown bear projects. They say that, you know, a hibernating bear, it's more amazing than a lot of us think. I just think a bear sleeps for many months. The truth is that brown bears actually slow their bodies to a lower level of activity than sleep. Torpor. Yeah. And I'm sure you know

most all of this or all this. But during that torpor, they're at such low levels of activity. They can live on the nutrients and the water in their bodies. But meanwhile, a brown bear mom mom can, quote, rouse slightly for pushing out and birthing a baby. That usually happens around February. And the cubs are in a relatively premature state of development, which is fine because they're hidden away in a hibernation den. And then the cubs remain at a normal level of wakefulness and activity while mom keeps hibernating.

And they nurse and borderline take care of themselves. Man. Extraordinary. It's just because like I actually haven't. I haven't really properly slept for three and a half months now. Yeah, good job, buddy. Me too. But you especially?

Actually, longer, because, like, I had some pregnancy insomnia. So I feel, it does feel like I haven't slept for an entire, like, year at this point. But, yeah, I mean, I got to get brother bared. Who do I call to get brother bared where I get turned into a bear? I guess now I'm thinking of the movie Brave. Yeah. She turns into a bear, right? She should have stayed bear.

That's, you know, like, she and her three, like those little triplets, they turned into bears. She's like a bear. If I were her, I'd be like, that's great. We're all bears now. It's just, let's just stick with this. Maybe Disney is trying to promote some sort of transformation into bears. Right. Like almost like it would be like a severance type service, you know,

It's like you find out who's like behind it and then you see this this wizened yellow bear and a red shirt and he's like, oh, Christopher Robin, it seems you have discovered. Wow, wizened's plotting Winnie the Pooh. That's a fun character. Yes, exactly. Like the architect and the matrix or something. Yeah. I've learned how to make quite a lot of honey. Yeah, and then one last fast takeaway also about brown bear hibernation is takeaway number five. Fat Bear Week saved a human life.

You know, that's, I'm not surprised. I was always a fan of Fat Bear Week. It's so cool. And it's like the fact that it's such a social media phenomenon saved a lost hiker. He got on the camera and asked for help. Wow. That's incredible. And people are like, people like, who is this bear?

He's not fat enough. All right. You won't get my vote. You're not nearly fat enough. Yeah, take off that raincoat. I can't see your fatness. Yeah. You know?

It was Fat Bear Week, 20203, saved somebody's life. And if folks don't know, the event began in 2014. It was initially a one-day social media stunt called Fat Bear Tuesday, which feels very fat Tuesday on Lent to me. I like it. But they highlighted the season. seasonal weight gain of brown bears in Cat May National Park in Alaska. And that one day they just said, this bear named Otis gained the most weight.

He wins. And then since 2014, this has exploded into an international event of about a dozen live feed cameras monitoring Cat May's brown bears. And people vote for which bear is subjectively the most exciting. It's not just a numbers game. Right. There's like a personality component. Yeah. And it's usually around September.

if you want to look for it. Last September 2025, a 1,200 pound bear named Chunk won the contest. Folks may know Chunk. Wow. Fans of Chunk. Yeah. I'm a big chunk fan. Chunk is great.

Yeah. And so here's NPR covering an event in the 2023 Fat Bear Week. Quote, on the Dumpling Mountain live stream around 3.30 p.m. local time September 5th, a man in a green rain jacket, wet and disheveled, appeared on screen and looked straight into the lens, clearly mouthing the words, help me. He returned a few minutes later giving a thumbs down signal, end quote. I mean, smart, chilling. Yeah.

Also, I mean, given that he's okay and they saved him, the thumbs down is like, that's pretty, I don't know. It's like, it's like, just in case you didn't realize, it's bad. It's bad being lost on the trail. Right. And like the next step for saving him was that. luckily this is like such a community event on the internet. They've set up live chats for the cameras.

Not all these animal wildlife cams have chats. The people on the chat contacted Park Rangers who saved the hikers life. And quoting NPR again, when the chat moderator shared this news with the viewers, there was a flood of kind words and a sweet celebration. And I'm crying because I'm so relieved, posted the user who originally flagged the man's appearance. Those rangers made it up there.

They're fast, end quote. Aw. And they really did. Fat Bear Week saved a guy. Like, the internet's good, man. That's great. That's so fantastic. Yeah.

So enjoy the next one. And yeah, it's specifically driven by yet another subgroup of brown bears. Like each of these little communities is so cool and special. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. And I mean, like, it's, I think just to emphasize how important that was, it's like being lost when you're hiking, especially in.

inclement weather because he was like, I'm looking at photos of him. It looks like he was pretty soaking wet from the rain. It's extremely dangerous because your body temperature can drop and it's not, you know, it's a real, real serious situation. So, yeah, that's, that's wild. They saved a guy. Absolutely. Like, he really could have died.

Yeah. The MPR also talks about those live feed cameras all being kind of small and tucked away because they don't want the bears disturbed. So it's really fortunate that he was able to find the thing. Like, it's not, it's not like there's a big sign pointing to it or something. Yeah, it's like quick, quick thinking on his part. Like, I'm glad that people responded by being not like, oh, this has got to be a prank or whatever, you know, like really taking it seriously. Just good stuff all around.

And also big ups to the bears for being so fat. I feel like they deserve credit to, like, congratulations to the guy for surviving and finding the camera to the. to the people watching for saving them, to the park rangers, and then the bears for being fat. Because without them and their fatness, he would not have been saved. It's legitimately true. Yeah, they're so charismatic and fat.

They're so fat. Like, that's another thing that I think that must be emphasized. You kind of probably just have an image of like, yeah, just normal bear a little bit chubby for hibernation. Like, now these bears get fat with a pH. more so than Winnie the poo to me, you know. Winnie is kind of sveled. Yeah.

Well, there was that one time that Winnie did get stuck in rabbits, a burrow hole. Remember that? He went in there and he ate so much honey that he got stuck. And his butt was sticking out of one area, his face, the other. So like, but that's essentially what it is in real life with these bears. Yes. It's sift to me that any of that is anything like a brown bear, especially because I think Winnie the Pooh is based on a teddy bear. We talk about that on the teddy bear show.

Like Winnie's not even really based on brown bears. But there's an alignment. It's fun. Well, Winnie, given that, so like he's yellow in the movies and in the original, like he's kind of a gold. I think the original stuffed toy is kind of a golden color. And so he must have been the one sort of the German origin ones that are based on the hybrid bears, right? because that golden color is the polar, it's sort of more of the grower bear,

Pizzley bear coloration. Yeah, he was based on a British toy from a British tour and they're close to Germany. That's the influence, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. And it's just any wild animal that is in any way as magical as the most magical toy

a human can think of. Yeah. That's so amazing. Yeah. Good for us. Good for bears. We're doing it. Good for bears.

Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, brown bears are the recent genetic origin of polar bears. Takeaway number two, brown bears are dangerous animals that you should stay away from, and they love honey and specific individuals get friendly with humans in ways that remind me of Winnie the Pooh. Two specific Winnie the Poohisms among specific individuals. Takeaway number three, we are trying to protect modern brown bears by doing facial recognition on them and not mistaking them for Yetis. Takeaway number four, brown bear moms can give birth while hibernating.

Takeaway number five, Fat Bear Week saved a human life. And then so many numbers beyond that, not just about the fat bears at Catmay National Park. Everything from the amazing variety of brown bear species all over the northern hemisphere, including formerly a part of Africa, to the name origin of the Chicago Bears, to the name origin of the top of the earth, and more. Those are the takeaways, and I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the

main episode. This week's bonus topic is the extraordinary religious, political, and cultural vibes of brown bears in Romania. Just the brown bears in just that one Eastern European country, borderline could have been a whole episode. Visit sifpod.fund. Fun for that bonus show for a library of more than 24 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include so much science writing and recent journalism about what brown bears are up to.

I can't recommend enough just looking at what we have from The Guardian, Popular Mechanics, J-Store Daily, the New York Times, Ars Technica. It's a lot of stories of brown bears doing stuff within the last year. Just since this time in 2025, brown bears have been making. news worldwide. Also have a lot of digital resources from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the Alaska Department of Game and Fish, the Scandinavian Brown Bear Project, and other national and state level departments that take care of the brown bears in our world. And I'm also leaning on scientific studies led by teams at UC Santa Cruz, the University at Buffalo, which is part of the State University of New York System, Texas Tech University, the University of Oulu in Finland,

the University of East Anglia in the UK. They built on work. at the University of Washington. There's just a lot of amazing biologists and other ecologists studying these extraordinary, adaptable omnivorous bears. I also have one other source that's basically just a behind-the-scenes thing. I'm not even going to link it because as interesting as the parts of it I read were, where it wasn't really useful for the episode. A lot of SIF episodes have further sources that I went through that just weren't good for material for specifically what we're doing. But I enjoyed what I read of a book called Eight Bears. mythic past and imperiled future. That's by environmental journalist Gloria Dickey. And, you know,

eight bears is a nice framework for a book because, again, there are eight specific bear species in the world. Thank you to folks for picking bears in general. And if you felt you want even more on bears, even though we touched on all eight, that's awesome. Suggest any of the other seven, and we'll see if we can make an episode. Anyway, that page does feature resources I linked, such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, a traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord.

We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 15. That's about the topic of socks. Such a SIF topic, socks. Fun fact, there used to be an entire city in the People's Republic of China that was primarily known for manufacturing socks for the rest of the world. So I recommend that episode.

I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. I always say if you like any SIF about an animal species, you're missing a trick if you're not hearing Creature Feature. You've got to check it out. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Budo Spand. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members.

And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network. Of artists' own shows. Supported.

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