With food available, many bears at Tahoe forgo hibernation | Hacker News Reader

With food available, many bears at Tahoe forgo hibernation

tahoedailytribune.com

The black bear population in CA has quadrupled since the state banned black bear hunting with dogs a long time ago.

Nonetheless, the humane society sponsors bills: https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/policy-and-legisla... and petitions: https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/wildlife-managemen... to completely ban bear hunting, claiming that "climate change" has decreased the population. When in reality it has not, the black bear population in CA has exploded, and in particular, the Tahoe area now sees a lot more human conflict with black bears due to their increased population and lack of habitat.

You can further see that the humane society opposes any and all hunting (not just hunting predators and bears) on their own website. Like say hunting whitetail deer, by far the most popular big game animal in the US: https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/what-do-about-deer

This political movement is directly opposed the science based management of wildlife. See the WA spring bear hunt ban: https://www.fieldandstream.com/hunting/washington-spring-bea.... Which was done despite the advice of the state's bioligists.

I'm not shocked that very left-leaning states are doing things like this

Is it just me or does that IHOP dumpster bear [1] look obese? If they're used to fattening up for the winter and going into torpor to burn off that fat, what happens when there's enough food to last them all winter too? Are we essentially just breeding a bunch of really fat bears?

It seems we need to get an ursidae anti-obesity program started ASAP.

[1] https://cdn.tahoedailytribune.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5...

I'd read before that many mammals lose more weight than bears during hibernation, but the weight they lose is a much more even distribution of different body tissues.

There's a lot of research on how bears are capable of burning almost entirely fat, while other animals would lose a lot of muscle and bone as well. A bear that isn't hibernating, IIRC, doesn't have this ability, so primarily fattening up in preparation for winter -- because that's all you need and it is more efficient -- may pose a problem if they start losing a lot of other tissues. But, presumably, if they were to lose more weight in winter be being awake than asleep, they'd just go to sleep. So they're probably not losing much more non-fat tissue.

Bears AFAIK don't suffer ill-health effects like humans do from obesity. It's natural for a bear, so heart disease and diabetes would've been strongly selected against in bears, while suffering approximately 0 negative selective pressure among our ancestors.

>It's natural for a bear, so heart disease and diabetes would've been strongly selected against in bears, while suffering approximately 0 negative selective pressure among our ancestors.

It certainly helps that bears rarely live past 20 years in the wild, and they start reproducing at age 3-6.

> But, presumably, if they were to lose more weight in winter be being awake than asleep, they'd just go to sleep.

This is quite a leap of faith, that they can do this calculation.

There's some kind of feedback mechanism going on with "if food is plentiful at a certain time, don't go to sleep", and evolution may have optimized this to avoid losing weight in typical scenarios, but evolution doesn't perform that well in outlier situations.

Looks like a typical, pre hibernation, fat bear: https://explore.org/meet-the-bears

The lady in the background has a jacket on, so that's not weird. Have to see what he looks like in spring time.

Have you seen how fat squirrels have been getting the past few years?

One thing to remember with black bears, unlike grizzly bears, is that many times human attacks are actually predatory. If you play dead, the bear will start eating you.

If you make loud noise, be big and frightening, black bears tend to run off. Pocket air horn is good for this but you can also just shake your arms above your head and go 'blahfhahabfwhehe'!

Grizzly bears, whole other class of animal. If you're going to hang out with grizzly bears, it's a good idea to have, at the least, adequately rated 'bear spray' and the knowledge of how to use it:

https://www.mtpr.org/montana-news/2019-08-27/are-you-sure-yo...

But in terms of equipment and training, a gun is worth a tremendous amount of peace of mind. Notably, because of polar bears, it is forbidden to leave town in Svalbard without a gun.

I'm a big fan of guns, but if I had to pick between a gun and a bear spray for the (exclusive) purpose of bear control during an outing, I would almost always pick the spray. Guns big enough to be effective against bears are heavy and cumbersome, and I dare say marksmanship good enough to be effective in a standoff against a bear is hard to come by for the average gunowner.

Of course, in remote enough situations where you might come across a grizzly, I would have a gun on my person in any case.

Spray also seems to me much less deleterious for the biosphere and such. Apex predators are crucial low-quantity members of food chains and it seems possible that a grizzly sprayed by humans one or more times will take the hint and avoid close human interaction. Or maybe they just learn to fight through it and we're double effed... I'm not signing up for that research program.

Shotgun and slugs, with a sling for carrying. Slugs tear through whatever is in the way.

I do have the big spray canister with holster, and that setup seems finicky. Though I haven't done live practice with it.

> ... 'blahfhahabfwhehe'!

I will practice that.

I did the ‘blahfhahabfwhehe’ thing at a cougar once, and she just stared at me.

The point is she didn’t pounce at the delicious blahfefe staring at her. :-)

My last interaction with a black bear (trying to get into a trash can, naturally), I saw the bear, the bear saw me, and we both quickly went our separate ways.

Yeah, black bear attacks are rare. So rare, in fact, that Yosemite National Park has banned bear spray despite having hundreds of black bears, because no one has ever been killed or seriously injured by a bear there.