The comments under the original story warm my wittle heart~ctm
28 August 2017 • 8:32pm
Grizzly bears have stopped eating salmon in favour of elderberries after being forced to make a choice due to climate change. Warming temperatures meant that the berries are ripening earlier than usual, at exactly the same time as the freshwater streams on Alaska’s Kodiak Island are overflowing with sockeye salmon.
The island’s brown bears typically feed first on salmon in early summer, followed by elderberries later in the season, in late August and September.
“What you have is a scrambling of the schedule,” said William Deacy, a biologist at Oregon State University that studied the phenomenon.
“It’s essentially like if breakfast and lunch were served at same time and then there is nothing to eat until dinner.
“You have to choose between breakfast and lunch because you can only eat so much at a time.”
The study found that during the unusually warm summer of 2014, the bears, which would traditionally kill up to 75 percent of the salmon, were nowhere to be seen near the streams.
Instead, they were in the hills busy munching on berries, which contain less protein and therefore take less energy to break down, causing them to gain weight more quickly.
Biologists warned that changes caused by a warming planet were behind the bears‘ unusual behavior and could affect the entire ecosystem.
The researchers found that the forests around the streams suffered because the bears’ fish carcasses were no longer there to enrich the soil.
“Bears switched from eating salmon to elderberries, disrupting an ecological link that typically fertilizes terrestrial ecosystems and generates high mortality rates for salmon,” the study said.
Read the story and comments here.
HT/Keith
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from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueberries_for_Sal
Bears, like most other mammals, synthesise their Vitamin C from sugar, Elderberrys are loaded with sugar, a sweet tooth exists in most mammals, even those which can’t synthesise their own Vit C.
Note: I prefer synthesize to synthesise but my spell checker…
We should expect that “apex predator species” such as Grizzlies and Polar Bears (previous article) would reflect the state of the food chain. If the food chain is abundant, then the apex predator species would have plentiful supply.
Of course, Carbon Dioxide is the base of the food chain. Increasing the abundance of the base of the food chain passes along this abundance through the chain up to the apex predator species.
Bears are gaining weight because of increased atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.
Home Run for Mr Homer!
The false and deceptive vilification and limitation of one of life’s building blocks is the greatest potential threat to terrestrial life ever concocted by men.
And this has never ever happened before? Really? Disrupting the ecological link! Bears getting fat quicker! Can’t have that.
This dude is a believer that everything nature has an unchanging, rigid, autistic sort of personality which we can tragically disturb with our very presence on this third rock. No changes! Changes are bad for Gaia!
So how much warming has occurred in this area of study?
Went to the Telegraph article. If there were comments they seem to have been removed. Can’t have anything disturbing the preferred narratve.
No, they are still there.
The comments at the DT can take quite a while to load, even after the link at the bottom of the article has finally shown up.
Oregon State? Is that the same school that put out the absurd article about feminist interpretations of glaciers so we could develop more ethical human-ice relations? (Yes, there was such an article) . Too much pot in Oregon, I think.
…and gone to pot.
If the green meanies really worried about what bears ate, they would move up to Kodiak and offer themselves up to be eaten by the bears. But, they won’t do it. Will they?
Of all of God’s creatures who will eat exactly what they want to eat, and at the times and places that they want to eat it, Bears are Number 1.
https://explore.org/livecams/bears/river-watch-brown-bear-salmon-cams
BTW the Bear cam picture is very pretty and the sounds are very soothing. Go look at it for a couple of minutes and de-stress.
Can the dendrochronologists proxy the temperature by the difference in tree fertilization from bear scat obtained from salmon vs berries?
Sure for a grant and pub. Order up
If the bears are now eating berries doesn’t that mean that vegetarians can now eat the bears when they end up as roadkill ? Sounds as sensible as George Monbiot advocating eating roadkilled squirrel pan-fried.
Around here we don’t depend on roadkill. Squirrel season opened August 26 with a daily limit of 10. A scoped 22 or a modified choke in 12 or 20 gauge is all you need. Besides, who wants a squirrel hide with tire tracks? Pan fried is ok but squirrel and dumplings does a better job of filling you up.
So once again ocean cycles don’t matter and more generic labeling wins again.
And just how much has Kodiak Island warmed over the last 20 years, if at all. Anyone know?
As per my post above. July temps were above average in 2014; below average this year.
”Warming” temperatures? I have never seen one of these. Are they animal, vegetable or mineral?
Forrest Gardener August 30, 2017 at 2:26 pm
No. It’s the polar bears which explode … or fall out of the sky … or something. Pretty sure that it wasn’t fish exploding though. Forgive me. It’s some time since I saw Al Gore’s first mockumentary.
***********************************
Mark Steyn reminds us that every time you fly in an airplane and generate CO2, a polar bear loses his wings.
My kids always preferred picking berries to fishing too. Smart Bears!
I always loved fishing as a kid.
But now I’m semi-vegetarian, so maybe picking berries would be more productive.
My oldest boy, now celebrating the birth of this first son, picked berries like bears do….wading into berry patches far taller than he, disappearing from sight, with a small kid-sized bucket that never ever got filled — filled his tummy first and dyed his face and hands purple in the process.
Perhaps it is due to a temporary shortage of bagels. Who would want lox without bagels?
I got nuthin cept another bear joke:
“In Montana, tourists are warned to wear tiny bells on their clothing when hiking in bear country. The bells warn away MOST bears. Tourists are also cautioned to watch the ground along the trail, paying particular attention to bear droppings to be alert for the presence of grizzly bears.
How can you tell a grizzly bear dropping?
It has tiny bells in it.”
Really? These morons are just now figuring out that berries ripen BEFORE the salmon runs hit? What a bunch of stupid c**ts.
no – the berries only now started ripening earlier…
More BS…
I always found elderberries to be very hard work for the amount of nutrition obtained. Pretty thin gruel.
If I had to do it to get enough energy to survive, I would go for a stream choked with salmon every time. I’m not persuaded that bears would make such a low-energy choice without some other confounding variable(s) influencing them. For example, maybe the bears actually prefer the hillside locations at that time of the year (mating? security? absence of irritating tourists and ecologists?) but don’t normally hang out there because there is not enough food to be had at those locations unless the elderberries have ripened early.
Maybe to the bears, berries are more delicious than salmon?
Not to mention the fact that the bears get a nice dose of tapeworms from eating salmon
Salmon says: burn more fossil fuels.
Eric, you gave me a great idea…’Berry Filet’, a fast food resturaunt catering to bears and serving all manner of berry treats. Their commercials will feature salmons hold a sign that says….’Eat more berries!’
I think climate scientists need to go walk those grizzly bears back to the streams and MAKE them eat salmon for their own good.
Usual astonishing over-reach.
(1) Put “climate change” in proposal
(2) get funding you never would get otherwise
(3) know nothing about climate and take alarmist assumptions verbatim
(4) find something, anything. Blame it on climate change
(5) recommend more study (another grant)
(6) hype to media.
(7) repeat
I would argue that this is an indication of a longer or colder winter coming. Hence the intuitive need of the bears to put on more fat.
Well could be. The nesting behavior of hornets, wasps and yellow jackets is a not bad indicator of winter weather. This year we are seeing hornet and wasp nest high of the ground, and yellow jackets burrowing into embankments facing south, as well as into south facing walls/eaves and overhangs of structures. We are due for a good, hard winter, tired of not getting much snow around here.