Posted on 08/26/2017 7:46:11 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
For bears, subsisting primarily on the salmon-run is problematic. The reason? Hookworm parasite. The fish are a carrier, and eating uncooked salmon eventually causes the bear’s gut to be full of worms. The only reason the Bears can tolerate it at all is that their guts empty when they hibernate, killing all the parasites.
Animals aren’t stupid. They are going to eat the highest value food available as long as the effort to get that food is minimal. If the berrys are ripe, which would you rather do? Stand in frigid waters on slippery rocks trying to catch a salmon that will make you sick, of stand in the sunshine chowing down on a bumper crop of berries?
Taking this analogy further, then, it's like having a choice between pancakes and kale salad. Given such a choice, I choose pancakes, yum! Yet the bears choose berries over fish? Seems "fishy" to me.
Right, because bears have NEVER, EVER, EVAH, EVAH, EVAH eaten berries before in the history of bears or berries!
EVAH!
Apparently one of the effects of modern civilization is total retardation.
Bears get hookworm from eating the flesh of uncooked salmon. So the nutritional value of the salmon is offset by a gut full of the parasite. There are packs of costal wolves in the Pacific Northwest who have learned to take advantage of the salmon run. Unlike bears, they only eat the fish heads and let the body of the fish lay (which bears and Eagles will scavenge). In this way, the wolves don’t get worms.
With a minor manipulation, that becomes...
"when I lived in Wyoming there weren’t any Salmon, and the grizzly bears seemed to be happy feeding on campers"
The leftists should be happy now if bears are turning vegetarian.
Grizzly bears have stopped eating salmon in favour of elderberries after being forced to make a choice due to climate change.
Patent Bullshit.
Don’t forget the spawning thing. May be a booming return in a few years.
You can tell by the tiny bells in it.
This is soooo stupid. Two-tenths of a degree of warming in twenty years is completely imperceptible to an animal that thrives amid yearly 100-degree temperature swings.
“Because you can only eat so much at one time.”
So the bears appear to really, really like berries. Maybe they prefer berries?
Yep..Gotta make those stinking Americans pay through the nose..HiLary in 2016.......Paris accords here we come..Hilary will make taxpayers pay till they scream.....Thank God,TRUMP can’t win......2016 talk between a bear and a moron..
OMG!! This cannot be true!!! Grizzly Bears are NOT “thinking” animals; they are not smart enough to ADAPT, they are just supposed to gradually ALL die off!!! The article cannot be true!!! It must be “fake news” put out by “Trump supporters” to show Grissly Bears ADAPTING TO CONDITIONS, unlike human beings are expected to!!! /sarc
Even BETTER news for salmon fishermen (and ladies).
Yeah, riiiiiight.
It’s amazing how gullable journalists are.
But, we must always remember, science was most definitely NOT their friend.
Else, why did they have to resort to the almost lowest form of work?
The lowest, of course, is to be a congresscritter.
Don’t forget, “smells like pepper.”
Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the dams on its tributaries, low water release due to industrial diversions or, for that matter, industrial accidents like the Mount Polley tailings dam failure.
Naw. Gotta be those evil Trump supporters...
To be honest, as a climate change skeptic I concede a gradual warming of the planet is ongoing. I just don’t believe that CO2 has anything to do with it. Bears will avoid diseased flesh and salmon have been afflicted with a virus for years. Bears are smarter than humans...the latter believing that we can change either climate or natural selection...
This piece is so stupid it takes my breath away...
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