
Grizzly on a treadmill/Washington State University
Surprise, surprise – scientists at Washington State University (WSU) have decided grizzly bears like trails for the same reason humans do.
Trails make cross-country travel a whole lot easier.
Alaskans who have spent a lot of time deep in the wilderness, where the only trails are animal trails, will not be surprised by this. Humans naturally gravitate toward bear trails, caribou trails, moose trails and sheep trails because any trail makes walking easier than bashing through the brush.
Bears turn to human trails for the very same reason.
This would seem so obvious it need not be studied, but now the obvious has been documented by researchers from WSU’s Bear Research, Education and Conservation Center who put grizzlies on treadmills to study their energy use and then examined 11 years of global positioning system (GPS) data from radio-collared grizzlies roaming Yellowstone National Park.
The anti-diet
When lead researcher
The animals spent twice as much time traveling on nearly flat surfaces as on slopes and when traveling uphill or downhill, they chose paths “approximately 54 percent less steep and (calorie) costly than the maximum available slope,” the researchers reported.
For animals that spend the snowless season trying to get as fat as possible to survive a winter-long hibernation, every calorie counts. And fat accumulation, whether for humans or bears, is at the end of the day a rather simple matter of consuming more calories than the body burns.
In the interest of calorie conservation, bears even appear to favor trails built to National Park Service standards aimed at making life easy for hikers.
“For example, National Park Service (1998) construction guidelines for trails recommend that gradients not exceed 10 percent in steep terrain,” the study says. “With two-thirds of the movement paths of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bears occurring within this gradient range (i.e. zero to 10 percent), it should not be surprising that they choose movement paths similar to humans and commonly use trails built for humans.”
Park Service trail builders can probably claim some credit for making life a tiny bit easier for the bears of Yellowstone with the more 900 miles of trail built in the park since 1872, but the same trails have come with consequences.
Carnahan and his team warned that the dangers of the shared use of trails by people and bears could “be exacerbated by the increasing popularity of trails for other forms of recreation, such as mountain biking when bears and humans encounter each other at high speed with little warning.”
Realistic risks
The threat of being attacked by a bear scares the bejesus out of many, but the Yellowstone experience well illustrates how rare such attacks.
The park in 2019 estimated the odds of being killed by a bear at 1 in 2.7 million visits, although that worsened to 1 in 232,613 person travel days in the park’s backcountry.
Bear attacks and deaths are the most common in the backcountry in Alaska. Both of those killed by bears last year in the state were miles from the nearest road.
Alaskan Daniel Schilling was building a trail in the Kenai Mountains near the historic mining community of Sunrise when he was attacked and killed in July. A 22-year-old Ohio hunter died in September after being attacked by a bear while packing moose meat from a kill site to a remote camp in the Alaska Range.
The WSU study did add some interesting information on bear running speeds. The researchers reported that “high-speed predatory chases of either calves or adult elk averaged 8.9 m s−1 (about 20 mph) and were much shorter in duration (12 seconds, plus or minus five) and distance (107 meters, plus or minus 35), presumably because the bears were well above their estimated aerobic capacity.”
In longer chases, some of which covered nearly three miles, speeds fell to under 4 mph.
The latter observation underlines the old Alaska advice that the best way to avoid bear problems is to avoid bears. If you see them before they see you and increase your distance from them, it’s an energy-losing proposition for them to come chasing after you.
The other big takeaway from the study is that place where people should be most alert is where they are usually least alert – on trails. Given the similar gradients on human and animal trails, this would appear to apply to all 49th state trails whether manmade or not.
This should be obvious to anyone on Kodiak Island or the Alaska Peninsula – where bear trails are often large and obvious – but might not be so obvious in areas where moose and caribou trails provide the most obvious routes of travel.
And, of course, this time of year with bears soon to emerge from hibernation, there are ski, snowshoe and snowmachine trails that are just as attractive to bears as any other trail. Anyone who spent much time on these trails in Alaska in April is certain to have run into the tracks of bears on them, especially in mountainous areas where grizzlies tend to den.
The good news is that with the snow burying alder and mountain thickets in the high country bears are a lot easier to spot and avoid than in summer.
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Just wondering how many tax dollars went to these people to point out the obvious. Are they still doing ketchup studies as well.
My personal opinion is their data is off regarding chase or travel speed . Perhaps they averaged it down to an inaccurate picture?. When the bears chased elk – what was the age of the bears? Was their snow ? Was it high country? Flat ? Slope ? How thick was brush? Was it in fallen timber? 4 mph in steep rocky hills/ mountains with snow would be an intense chase effort. 4 mph for 3 miles on a flat trail shouldnt be classified as chase . Differences between bears and their body weight as to determining a chase effort and its outcome is enormous. At long distances Ive watched some bears put in a serious chase effort over several mountains while others chase caribou a few hundred yards and sit down on their haunches, give up and shake their heads. ( actual action) As to what ive seen, bears are far better hunter stalker / planners/ ambushers using wind direction, shadows and hiding behind small mounds to out think their prey than technical chasers. Thats what would have been even more interesting to document. Though I guess Obviously accidental encounters on or near trails is probably a hazard.
When I hear the words “researchers, scientists, studies, etc.” It reminds me of our failed academic institutions. I mean, sheesh, “does a bear chit in the woods”? To think some of our most brilliant minds came up with this conclusion just yesterday:
“CHICAGO (Reuters) -Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE (NASDAQ:BNTX) said on Wednesday their COVID-19 vaccine was safe and effective and produced robust antibody responses in 12 to 15-year olds, paving the way for them to seek approval in the United States and Europe in weeks.
In the trial of 2,260 adolescents aged 12 to 15, there were 18 cases of COVID-19 in the group that got a placebo shot and none in the group that got the vaccine, resulting in 100% efficacy in preventing COVID-19, the companies said in a statement.”
Based on Pfizer numbers the placebo was 99.2% effective against preventing COVID-19 as well.