Five grizzly bear cubs with a single adult female (one on the left of mom) were documented by West Yellowstone resident Carolyn Golba on Wednesday. (Carolyn Golba/screenshot from video)
Posted on 06/07/2024 11:38:12 AM PDT by SJackson
Five grizzly bear cubs with a single adult female (one on the left of mom) were documented by West Yellowstone resident Carolyn Golba on Wednesday. (Carolyn Golba/screenshot from video)
Within hours of the sighting on Wednesday, Frank van Manen caught word that there was a grizzly sow with five cubs in tow spotted in Yellowstone National Park.
Five cubs following mom is so unlikely that van Manen, who leads the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, pondered an explanation.
Maybe, he said, there was an adoption event: Sometimes two female siblings produce cubs in the same year, and one ends up with the other’s youngsters.
“We’ve seen that before, with adoptions taking place,” van Manen said.
Grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem typically have one to three cubs. A four-cub litter is an extreme rarity: documented just 11 times since grizzly monitoring began a half-century ago — most recently by world-famous Grizzly 399 in 2020.
“If this was truly a litter of five, it would be the first one recorded in the history of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, for sure,” said van Manen, who leads the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team.
The sighting will go down as a record five-cub litter, unless Yellowstone officials somehow come up with genetic samples from all five cubs and can prove one isn’t a sibling, he said.
We saw 399 with her four cubs the spring they were born - I think I read somewhere that she has two cubs this year.
Five cubs - wow! Poor mama.
😄
The rangers at Yellowstone are VERY hyper vigilant about keeping tourons (tourist morons) away from the grizzlies. We were there last summer, and the rangers route traffic and are high alert if a grizzly is nearby.
It was kind of cool to watch the procedures they take to protect the grizzlies.
Thx
No certainty here but I think I once heard 30%.
Somebody will want to get a selfie with those lol
If adoption is concluded, I submit that two cubs in the photo, from L to R, number 2 and number 5 are from another sow. FWIW.
Video at 2:14 in:
https://youtu.be/8I-dqqqhAYY?si=wWf32tRPmgJSSV9v
And here’s one of a mom and four cubs from four years ago.
https://youtu.be/iUa6Yz5mB5Q?si=v-vOoq2JTvjN_Pr1
The video link in post #28 is the current one of mom and five cubs.
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