From Hakai Magazine:
The brown bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve are huge, so much so that they are the subject of a popular tournament called Fat Bear Week. Each year, an online audience votes on which bear—gorged on salmon from the Brooks River—is the chonkiest. Last summer, the 450-kilogram giant Otis was crowned the year’s fattest bear. But new research conducted on a lonely stretch of the park’s coast, far from the gaze of Fat Bear Week’s cameras, shows that some of Alaska’s bears have shifted their diets away from salmon, one of their richest foods, with unknown consequences for their future.
Working with National Park Service biologists, Joy Erlenbach led the research, which began in 2015 while she was a graduate student at the University of Washington. The work shows that the proportion of salmon in female brown bears’ diets in Hallo Bay has decreased more than 50 percent over the past three decades, possibly in response to declining salmon runs. Salmon made up 62 percent of the bears’ diets in 1989, but by 2017 it was just 28 percent, says Erlenbach.
The bears replaced salmon with increased consumption of berries, sedges, and leafy vegetation—despite the availability of clams and other fish. The finding shows that bears can get by on a largely herbivorous diet, suggesting plants are a buffer resource when favored foods like salmon decline.
The work highlights the famous dietary adaptability of bears. But it also raises questions about how leaner diets could affect them in the future....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
UPDATED—It's Fat Bear Week And A Media Frenzy!
Update: Unbeknownst to me there had been a single-elimination Fat Bear Junior competition to select one cub to compete against the adults.
The winner was (drumroll please):
Original post:....MUCH MORE
That chubby cubby is not the result of dining on 'leafy greens.'
