In pointing a finger at these human cousins the authors of the paper may have been too quick to rule out bears wild boars
We know that modern bears are attracted by abandoned hearths and they would probably leave droppings behind without any afterthoughts Bocherens told Live Science in an email.
He added that scientists need a much better reference database for the profile of chemicals they should expect to see in the fossilized feces of different animals such as bears and humans.
Climate smart agriculture is a space that bears watching and perhaps even some guarded optimism is in order.
><p>Archaeologists in Israel have uncovered intricate mosaics on the floor of a 1500-year-old Byzantine church including one that bears a Christogram surrounded by birds.</
><p>Polar bears have shifted to a diet of more land-based food in response to climate change
</p><p>The results suggest that polar bears at least in the western Hudson bay area may be slightly more flexible in the face of climate change than previously thought.</
<a href=http://www. livescience. com/42807-polar-bear-diet-shifting. html target=blank>Polar bears Hunt On land as Ice Shrinks</a p><p></p><p>The world
and conservationists have focused on limiting forest cutting to save the black-and-white bear. But Hull and her colleagues noticed increasingly that bamboo was vanishing from protected areas.
#Polar bear Caught on Camera with Eerie Musk ox Horn (Photo) In the blue light of the Russian Arctic scientists captured a rare photo of a polar bear approaching a musk ox carcass Thursday (March 27.
Located 300 miles (483 kilometers) north of the Arctic circle Wrangel Island boasts the highest biodiversity in the Arctic including the biggest population of Pacific walruses and the greatest density of polar bear dens.
Several factors including predation by grizzly bears hunting access to winter habitats winters with freezing rain
the ups and downs of getting grumpy bears to have sex Louisa Richmond-Coggan does not work for consult to own shares in
and are sticky such as fruit snacks and fruit rollups gummy bears and even raisins. These foods stick in between the child s back teeth
. and Chinese researchers concluded Nesbit's most recent Op-Ed was Will Grizzly-Polar bear Hybrid Wake People Up to Changing Climate?.
Of these more than 330 were killed unintentionally including wolves foxes skunks opossums raccoons bobcats and black bears.
These devices often capture non-target animals including rare and threatened species such as wolverines lynx and grizzly bears.
Needless to say that is a practice like this story that bears repeating. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues
#Bears: Facts & Pictures Bears a small group of mostly large omnivorous mammals can be found all over the world;
they live in forests mountains tundra deserts and grassy areas. Though there are different types of bear all bear species have similarities.
They all have covered stocky fur bodies; short legs; and a round head with a long snout.
There are eight species of bear: American black bear Asiatic black bear brown bear giant panda bear polar bear spectacled bear sloth bear and sun bear according to the International Association for Bear Research & Management.
Asiatic black bears have a distinctive white V-shaped patch on their chests. Sloth bears have similar patches as well as light-colored muzzles.
Sun bears have a crescent-shaped marking on their chests that looks like a rising sun. Spectacled bears also called Andean bears get their name because of the white circular markings around the eyes.
Brown bears despite their name come in many colors from light cream to almost black according to the San diego Zoo.
Similarly American black bears can be black as well as chocolate and cinnamon brown causing some people to confuse them with brown bears.
Giant pandas are noted for their striking black-and-white coloration. Polar bears with distinctive white fur are the largest bears.
An adult male polar bear can grow to be 3. 5 to 5 feet long (1 to 1. 5 meters)
and usually weighs between 775 and 1200 lbs. 351 to 544 kilograms. The smallest bear is the sun bear.
It grows to be 4 to 5 feet long (1. 2 to 1. 5 m)
and weighs 60 to 150 lbs. 27 to 68 kg. Brown bears are found in more places than any other bear species. They live in northwestern North america the Atlas Mountains of northwestern Africa northern Asia Europe and the Middle east.
There are several subspecies of brown bears. Brown bears found in coastal Alaska are called Kodiak or Alaskan brown bears. The Alaskan Peninsular brown bear lives only on the western tip of the Alaskan peninsula as its name implies.
In the interior of North america brown bears are called sometimes grizzly bears because their fur has white or tan tips.
Grizzly means sprinkled or streaked with gray.)Related: Image Gallery: Best of Bears American black bears live only in North america
and spectacled bears are found only in South america. Asiatic black bears are found all over Asia. The sloth bear is also found in Asia particularly in India Nepal Bhutan
and Sri lanka but may have disappeared from Bangladesh. Polar bears and giant pandas are some of the rarest types of bears.
Polar bears are found only in icy lands of the Arctic and pandas are found only in wet
and cool bamboo forests of Central asia. Many bears in the Northern hemisphere hibernate when the weather is cold.
Hibernation is a deep sleep that allows a bear to live without food for long periods of time.
Brown bears for example spend four to six months sleeping in their dens according to the San diego Zoo.
Their temperature drops slightly their heart rate slows and their bodies use stored fat to stay alive.
Most bears are solitary and only interact with their young. Most bears are normally active during the day
unless they encounter humans frequently. Then they may become nocturnal to avoid contact. Asiatic black bears on the other hand are typically nocturnal.
They sleep during the day in trees or caves and hunt at night. Bears are omnivorous meaning they eat vegetation and meat.
Each species of bear has certain foods that they eat more than others though. For example the polar bear eats mostly seals
and the giant panda bear spends 12 hours per day eating bamboo. Termites are the primary food of sloth bears.
Sloth bears have especially long noses that allow them to suck termites from their holes. For the most part bears have their young in dens.
Dens are made homes from hollowed-out trees caves and piles of brush. Bears can also create a den by digging a hole into a hillside or under tree roots.
Because bears are mammals they give birth to live young. Baby bears are called cubs. Cubs are completely defenseless
when they are born and rely on their mothers for food and protection. Sun bear cubs have no hair
and cannot smell or hear when they are born. Their mother will often stand upright like a human and carry their cubs in their paws or mouth according to the San diego Zoo.
Cubs can be smaller than teddy bears. Brown bears weigh as little as 16 to 25 ounces (454 to 709 grams)
when they are born. Newborn sun bears are even smaller and can weigh 7 to 12 ounces (198 to 340 g). The taxonomy of bears according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information system is:
Six of the eight bear species (all except brown bears and American black bears) are endangered or vulnerable according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The giant panda is endangered the most bear. It is estimated that only 1000 to 2000 remain alive in the wild according to the IUCN.
Polar bears are endangered also. According to the World Wildlife Federation there are only 20000 to 25000 polar bears left.
The IUCN lists sun bears and sloth bears as vulnerable due to habitat loss. e
#Forest Loss and Climate: Empowering Communities Can Help (Op-Ed) Andrew Steer is the president and CEO of the World Resources Institute a global research organization that works in more than 50 countries.
Steer serves on the executive board of the U n. secretary general's Sustainable Energy For All initiative.
He co-chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Natural Capital and is a member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development.
He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The need for a successful climate deal has never been clearer change cannot wait until the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris next year.
With nine of the hottest years on record occurring in this young century and a total of $2. 8 trillion in extreme-weather costs since 1980 the evidence of a changing climate is pervasive and alarming.
The time to act is now. No solution to climate change can be found without reducing deforestation which accounts for more than 11 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Every minute of every day the planet loses an area of forest the size of 50 soccer fields.
Forest loss and degradation is also the main reason why species loss is running at a rate 1000 times that of the preindustrial era.
Some political leaders believe their countries must cut down forests to develop their economies. But recent experience shows that healthy economic growth is more likely where forests are maintained
and degraded land is restored. Smart governments are now increasingly seeking to protect their forests while accelerating growth.
And yet despite this new understanding and the best of intentions to protect forests the loss continues.
A major reason is that those who know forests best the communities that have lived with them
and used them for centuries are empowered not to protect them. Some of the strongest advocates for the world's forests are the communities that depend on them for food livelihoods and culture.
It bears mentioning that many potato chips are flavored now with Hispanic-style ingredients such as jalapeno peppers or nacho cheese.
the pandemic H1n1 (swine flu virus currently circling the globe bears an uncanny resemblance to an influenza virus that wreaked havoc nearly a century ago,
Polar-bear protection: The US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed on 22 october to designate around 500,000 square kilometres of critical habitat 96%of which is sea ice for the polar bear.
The bear was listed as a threatened species in 2008 owing to projections of sea-ice declines caused by global warming.
The government is obligated already to avoid actions that jeopardize the bear, but the designation would add another layer of protection by also making it illegal to conduct activities that adversely affect the bear's habitat.
Vaccine report: More children than ever are being immunized, but 24 million infants in the world's poorest nations still do not receive routine immunization, according to a report by the World health organization, UNICEF and the World bank.
The 21 october State of the World's Vaccines and Immunization report says that although four in five children now have access to lifesaving vaccines,
It would have been only the second mammal other than the polar bear to be afforded such protection explicitly because of climate change.
since the polar bear in 2008 to be listed as'threatened'under the US Endangered Species Act because of climate change.
Bulfone-Paus bears substantial responsibility for the postdocs'scientific misconduct, the committee charged. See go. nature. com/ik1pgp for more.
Polar-bear pad The US Fish and Wildlife Service has set aside roughly 484,000 square kilometres in Alaska and the surrounding seas as a'critical habitat'for the polar bear (Ursus maritimus),
more than two years after the species was given a protection status of'threatened'by the US Endangered Species Act.
but federal agencies have to ensure that proposed activities don't jeopardize polar bears and their habitat.
But pandas are bears, a generally carnivorous family, and neither produce the enzymes necessary to digest cellulose nor harbour the same microbes as ruminants.
A broad survey of animal gut microbes found that pandas'microorganisms resembled those of black bears, polar bears and other meat-eaters3.
including woolly mammoths, giant sloths and cave bears. Within 40 000 years two-thirds of them were gone.
The genetic make-up of one individual a female farmer known as GÃ k4 bears a startling similarity to that of modern-day Mediterraneans.
or decorated with the outline of a bear contained traces of DNA from the Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus),
Tomato genome sequence bears fruitthe genome sequence of one of the world s highest-value salad plants the tomato has been decoded by an international team of scientists,
Research published in Biology Letters in 2010 describes a 48-million-year-old fossilized leaf from Germany that bears the distinctive scars of a bite from an ant's mandible on its main vein.
or egg cells that bear the DNA of endangered or extinct species and can provide the genetic code to restore
His shots of polar bears (Ursus maritimus and other animals on Russia's Wrangel Island wowed the crowd at Wildphotos.
sit at trophic level 3. Cod, a fish that eats other fish, claims level 4. Polar bears and orcas,
Yellowstone grizzlies face losing protected statusfor the US government, the grizzly bears of Yellowstone national park in Wyoming embody a stunning success story:
More than 700 bears now roam the region, up from 136 in 1975, when the grizzly (Ursos arctos horribilis) was listed as threatened after decades of deadly clashes with ranchers, hunters and park visitors.
But the US Fish and Wildlife Service is expected now to lift the legal safeguards, after a government advisory panel of wildlife officials endorsed delisting the bear last month.
Conservation groups have pushed back, saying that the government has estimated under  the threat that climate change poses to the bears food supply,
especially stands of whitebark pine. As the Yellowstone region has warmed, mountain pine beetles and blister rust fungus once thwarted by the cold,
depriving grizzlies of energy-rich pine nuts. Moreover, say conservationists, invasive fish have crowded out native cutthroat trout in Yellowstone Lake at the heart of the park,
reducing another important food source for the bears.""We have unprecedented an situation with deteriorating foods,
The centre was one of several groups that sued the US government in 2007, following an earlier attempt to delist the bear.
After two years, a district-court judge restored protection, citing concerns about the declining whitebark pine and its effect on the bears diet.
A report delivered in November by the US Geological Survey s Interagency Grizzly bear Study Team describes a resilient and healthy bear population that has adapted to the loss of pine nuts by eating more elk and bison
keeping fat stores at levels that allow the bears to survive and reproduce. For Christopher Servheen, a biologist who oversees grizzly-bear recovery efforts at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Montana, that is not surprising."
"Bears are flexible, he says.""It s easier to say what they don t eat than
what they do eat. Source: IGBSTBUT other researchers suspect that the change carries a steep price."
A reliance on meat heightens the risk that adult bears will come into contact with humans,
For young bears, it may increase the frequency of potentially deadly interactions with aggressive adult male bears and wolves.
A study published last July suggests that the government s figure of 741 Â bears is inflated (D. Â F. Â Doak and K. Â Cutler Conserv.
) The number of survey flights used to count bears has tripled since the mid-1990s, but, the study argues,
because the model assumes that female bears will reproduce consistently throughout their 30-year lives, with no decrease in fertilityas they age.
Mattson says that population estimates have jumped in the past by more than 100 Â bears when the statistical method has shifted."
but so has the grizzly bears range (see Home on the range), which cancels out any observer bias from increased search hours.
And although the govern  ment s official estimate of the population did jump from 629 to 741 bears this year,
That is in part because the revision takes into account a 2011 demographic study of bear survival rates based on radio-collar tracking data the first such study
But even that is unlikely to be the last word on the grizzlies: conservation groups are already gearing up to sue.
Perhaps the only point on which the US government and its opponents agree is that there will be more legal wrangling over the Yellowstone bears future."
Black bears are much more prevalent in Minnesota yet bear attacks are also extremely rare. The dearth of evidence (low incidence of attack) seems to suggest that wolves foxes coyotes
and bears are all pretty good at avoiding human beings. Then again I'm not as expertly trained on the subject as you are.@
and killed by a bear and not killed by a wolf however wolves as many other animals are scavengers
if it were a bear a lion a tiger or the last snow leopard. Human safety has always been
But the panda is a bear! Bears aren't even evolved to eat bamboo! Paraphrased Response:
What you're really saying is it's bad for animals to eat something different than
Why should we care about a sleepy lazy bear? Paraphrased Response: I'm just going to joke around cause some animals are lazier than others.
We're spending so much money on these dumb bears! We should be spending it elsewhere!
Other cuscuses like the Sulawesi bear cuscus are limited to particular islands. It's about the size of a big housecat and lives in the dense foliage of trees from rainforests to hardwood forests to eucalyptus forests.
#Grizzly bear Survival: Yet Another Reason Not To Shoot Yellowstone Wolveseven though every respectable regulatory service says shooting wolves in
Grizzly bears? How? Putting together the puzzle pieces of a diverse ecosystem like Yellowstone is tricky;
The iconic endangered-in-the-U s. grizzly bear relies on lots of fruit especially berries when preparing for its winter hibernation.
and others and make up a substantial portion of the grizzly's diet in the summertime.
A lower amount of berries has been found to have a negative effect on the survival and reproductive abilities of grizzlies the following year.
Elk eat berries just like the bears do. But without wolves the elk population has exploded
which means there's hardly any berries left for the bears. So the bears aren't as well fed
which makes them less healthy. And it's not even just as simple as that. The elk are eating so many berries including the entire berry shrubs that animals that rely on the shrubs like bees
The bears without access to the fruit they'd normally be eating have to eat more meat
and the ranchers shoot bears or wolves or whatever else they feel like because Wyoming does not know
The researchers from Oregon State university and Washington state University analyzed grizzly bear scat and found that the percentage of berries in the scat has doubled since the reintroduction of the wolves.
If a bear or some wolves wonder onto my property and effectively steals a thousand dollar cow from me
and i'm going to drag their dead carcass out for all the other hungry bears and wolves to see
A Pew survey taken last month bears this out: Android is beating ios in all income brackets except one.
Thanks to the biggest pyromaniac of them all Smokey the Bear we've been seeing an uptick in the devastation of forest fires
I just don't see how we were duped by that bear. He has'Smokey'in his name for goodness sake!
Some bears just want to watch the world burn. Oh stop it makes me want to weep.
When you see a bear die off it would probably be a good time to consider spending more time with your family.
They're scavengers predators and carnivores (not omnivores like bears. I say feed'em what they want.
and owners a libertarian wonderland where for a mere ten-dollar processing fee you can have a pet grizzly bear.
and animals that would prefer to murder you than let you pat them on the head (big cats bears baboons) are outlawed all.
Class 3 includes venomous reptiles and all species of bear big cat and wolf. All three classes are legal!
You can't possibly know for any given rancher what burden he is being forced to bear by wolves killing his animals nor can you begin to know his ability to bear those costs.
And if some GMO pollen does blow into an organic field it won't necessarily nullify organic status. Even foods that bear the Non-GMO Project label can be 0. 5 percent GMO by dry weight.
A horse contains more than 200000 calories and a bear three times that much. And that s just from their most appetizing parts.
This is not just about disappearing polar bears or melting ice caps. This is about protecting our health and our homes.
I like polar bears and I know about melting ice caps. Taking aim at critics of regulating carbon emissions Mccarthy dismissed charges that the plan's mandated cuts will cause power prices to skyrocket
In recent years it has spread across Asia and Australia devastating plants there that bear the signature yellow supermarket fruit.
It bears on design that endless question. Good night good night! Read the rest of the letters in the March 1903 issue of Popular Science magazine c
The pillar which still stands bears an inscription documenting a visit by Emperor Asoka to the site of The buddha's birth as well as the site's name--Lumbini.
The modern platypus completely lacks teeth as an adult and instead bears horny pads in its mouth.
#Camera traps reveal Andean bears hate paparazzia series of camera-trap images released by the Wildlife Conservation Society today shows rare Andean bears acting like angry Hollywood celebrities--at least
The stop-action images reveals adult bears and cubs repeatedly surrounding and attempting to dismantle the Reconyx camera traps secured to trees.
One series of images shows a particularly determined bear attacking a camera and leaving it torn open and dangling.
The remote cameras were set by WCS scientists studying Andean bears and other wildlife in Apolobamba National Natural Area of Integrated Management--a Bolivian protected area that borders Madidi National park and Natural Area of Integrated Management considered one of the world
This allowed images from one camera to take images of the marauding bears while they attacked the other cameras.
Andean bears are very curious animals says Dr. Lilian Painter WCS's Bolivia Country Director.
Still we were able to record important images that will allow us to better understand their distribution abundance and behavior and conserve these delightful bears into the future.
Andean bears are Latin america's only bear species. Also known as a spectacled bear they often have light fur resembling glasses around their eyes.
The Andean bear's preferred habitat are high-altitude pã¡ramo grasslands and especially the adjoining dense cloud forests in steep remote regions where the bears are seen rarely.
The wide-ranging Andean bears once had a safe haven in the undeveloped habitat of Andean cloud forests
but land is increasingly being fragmented for agriculture grazing lands and human settlements. The future of this wondrous but vulnerable species depends on the creation
and effective management of a network of protected areas that can sustain the bears in the wild.
Fortunately for the photographed bears and thanks to the Bolivian government they live in one of largest continuous protected patches of cloud forest across three national protected areas:
and wildlife including Andean bears including road construction logging unsustainable natural resource use and agricultural expansion. In addition WCS conserves the Andean bear across its range from Ecuador to Venezuela.
WCS aims to develop local capacity to conserve the habitat of the species and mitigate a variety of threats to them including human-wildlife conflict
Foundation the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and Cleveland Zoological Society the Andean Bear Conservation Alliance Woodland Park Zoo and other generous
WCS's Queens Zoo exhibits Andean bears as part of a Species Survival Plan a cooperative breeding program that helps to maintain healthy populations of the animals in zoos throughout the U s. Video:
and eating behaviour observations on all pigs via genome wide association studies to detect eating behaviour genes--a big task equivalent to finding polar bears in a snowstorm says Kadarmideen.
and mammals like the endangered Amur (or Siberian) tiger Asiatic black bear and wild boar. Listed as Endangered by IUCN Blakiston's fish owl is restricted to riparian areas in Russia China Japan and possibly North korea.
#Of bears and berries: Return of wolves aids grizzly bears in Yellowstonea new study suggests that the return of wolves to Yellowstone national park is beginning to bring back a key part of the diet of grizzly bears that has been missing for much of the past century--berries that help bears
put on fat before going into hibernation. It's one of the first reports to identify the interactions between these large important predators based on complex ecological processes.
The researchers found that the level of berries consumed by Yellowstone grizzlies is significantly higher
The report said that berries may be sufficiently important to grizzly bear diet and health that they could be considered in legal disputes--as is white pine nut availability now--about
whether or not to change the threatened status of grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act.
Wild fruit is typically an important part of grizzly bear diet especially in late summer when they are trying to gain weight as rapidly as possible before winter hibernation said William Ripple a professor in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems
Berries are one part of a diverse food source that aids bear survival and reproduction and at certain times of the year can be more than half their diet in many places in North america.
and shrub recovery researchers said this improves the diet and health of grizzly bears. In turn a healthy grizzly bear population provides a second avenue of control on wild ungulates especially on newborns in the spring time.
Yellowstone has a wide variety of nutritious berries--serviceberry chokecherry buffaloberry twinberry huckleberry and others--that are highly palatable to bears.
These shrubs are eaten also by elk and thus likely declined as elk populations grew over time.
With the return of wolves the new study found the percentage of fruit in grizzly bear scat in recent years almost doubled during August.
Because the abundant elk have been an important food for Yellowstone grizzly bears for the past half-century the increased supply of berries may help offset the reduced availability of elk in the bears'diet in recent years.
and animals consumed by grizzly bears. There is precedent for high levels of ungulate herbivory causing problems for grizzly bears who are omnivores that eat both plants and animals.
Before going extinct in the American Southwest by the early 1900s grizzly bear diets shifted toward livestock depredation the report noted
because of lack of plant-based food caused by livestock overgrazing. And in the absence of wolves black bears went extinct on Anticosti Island in Canada after over-browsing of berry shrubs by introduced while-tailed deer.
Increases in berry production in Yellowstone may also provide a buffer against other ecosystem shifts the researchers noted--whitebark pine nut production a favored bear food may be facing pressure from climate change.
Grizzly bear survival declined during years of low nut production. Livestock grazing in grizzly bear habitat adjacent to the national park and bison herbivory in the park likely also contribute to high foraging pressure on shrubs
and forbs the report said. In addition to eliminating wolf-livestock conflicts retiring livestock allotments in the grizzly bear recovery zone adjacent to Yellowstone could benefit bears through increases in plant foods.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Oregon State university. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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