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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The Telegraph report is mostly wrong. The bears studied are not grizzly bears, but just Kodiak Brown Bears.
The study shows, without a doubt, that Kodiak Brown Bears will preferentially feed on ripe elderberries over salmon, every time. That’s all it shows about the bears.
The rest of the study shows that elderberries on Kodiak Island have extremely variable ripening dates and these dates may or may not depend on average spring temperatures. For example, in 2010, elderberries did not ripen AT ALL. No elderberries that year, and the salmon got hammered by hungry bears.
There have been three “early ripening years” since 2010. There were three similar (even earlier) ripening years around 1980, and several anomalous late ripening years in the mid-1970s. The graph of ripening dates is spoiled by drawing a computer-generated false/inappropriate trend line across generally data with a wide natural variation.
Salmon researchers might write this story quite differently — showing how salmon spawning is much more successful when elderberry ripening dates distract the brown bear population during the height of the yearly spawn.
correction: “false/inappropriate trend line across generally flat data “
I’m not a biologist so I have two questions1) the article says that the bear scat containing salmon would fertilize the forest and that the lack of salmon carcasses leaves the forest barren. So do the dead salmon get up and walk away from their steam into the woods to decay, or do the bears walk throughout the woods to poop? 2) if a scientific study found ” their is no change and no problem” does he automatically get fired and have to give his grant money back?)
The bears leave not only poop but partially consumed salmon through a wide area around the rivers
Birds scavenge the salmon carcasses.
Liberals are so stupid about subjects they believe in, such as a coming global warming catastrophe (that will never come), that stupid writers like Victoria Ward can say just about anything … and there’s no skepticism or questions.
Brown and black bears are omnivores — they’ll eat just about anything — what they choose to eat is the tastiest food they can find — if enough food was available, they would choose to be 80% to 90% vegetarian.
If ripe berries are available, then they will choose ripe berries over salmon.
They’re probably sick of salmon and can’t wait until the berries are ripe.
Some years the ripe berries will be available sooner than other years.
So what?
This has nothing to do with climate change — daytime highs are not affected by CO2 — US had the highest measured daytime highs in the 1930’s.
Sometimes i think the main effect of climate change is to kill off brain cells of Democrats, liberals progressives and other socialists.
I could tell one of them my cat has gone on a vegetarian diet due to climate change and I think they would believe me — it’s almost impossible to make up a climate doom story that a liberal won’t believe — and some of them even have college degrees.
CTM, thanks for the h/t on the post – Keith
another day, another rent seeking paper.