Given a choice, captive bears mimic mixed diets of their wild peers:
Bears are not cats or dogs, and feeding them like they are likely shortens their lives.
A new study in Scientific Reports on the diets of giant pandas and sloth bears adds more evidence that bears are omnivores like humans and need a lot less protein than they are typically fed in zoos.
"Bears are not carnivores in the strictest sense like a cat where they consume a high-protein diet," said lead author Charles Robbins, a Washington State University wildlife biology professor. "In zoos forever, whether it's polar bears, brown bears or sloth bears, the recommendation has been to feed them as if they are high-protein carnivores. When you do that, you kill them slowly."
Journal Reference:
Robbins, C.T., Christian, A.L., Vineyard, T.G. et al. Ursids evolved early and continuously to be low-protein macronutrient omnivores [open]. Sci Rep 12, 15251 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19742-z
[...] The current study, along with previous ones, also shows that when captive bears are given dietary options, they will choose foods that imitate the diets of wild bears.
"There's certainly this long-standing idea that humans with Ph.D.s know a lot more than a sloth bear or a brown bear," said Robbins. "All of these bears started evolving about 50 million years ago, and in terms of this aspect of their diet, they know more about it than we do. We're one of the first to be willing to ask the bears: What do you want to eat? What makes you feel well?"
Robbins, the founder of the WSU Bear Center, the only research institution in the U.S. with a captive population of grizzlies, has studied bear nutrition for decades. [...] At the time, the researchers had theorized that the notoriously voracious bears would gorge on salmon, sleep, get up and eat more salmon.
Instead, they saw the bears would eat salmon, but then wander off and spend hours finding and eating small berries. Seeing that, Robbins' laboratory started investigating diet with the grizzly bears housed at the Bear Center and found they gained the most weight when fed a combination of protein, fats and carbohydrates in the combination of salmon and berries.
[...] "It just opens up so many more food resources than just being a straight, high protein carnivore," Robbins said.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2022, @05:25AM
I could have told them that for
free25% less thantheywe paid.(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2022, @05:27AM
They should feed some ice tubers to those polar bears.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fraxinus-tree on Friday October 21 2022, @09:44AM (5 children)
In my native language (Bulgarian), we have a separate word for a bear (we have european brown bears, Ursus arctos arctos, wandering around) that has changed its completely-vegetarian diet and started seeking and eating meat. We also do have a centuries-long tradition of weeding these ones from the general bear population. Bears held in captivity here are never fed meat at any rate. But it is good to see that someone applied scientific approach instead of common wisdom to the topic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2022, @11:10AM (1 child)
Do the vegetarian bears have stinkier farts than the carnivores?
Inquiring minds want to know...(grin).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2022, @03:54PM
More importantly, where do they shit?
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday October 21 2022, @11:45PM (2 children)
Now I'm curious, what are those words? I've got this vague impression we might have the same in Swedish, but I can't for the life of me recall right now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fraxinus-tree on Sunday October 23 2022, @06:10PM (1 child)
Well, Bulgarian words are: "мечка" ("metchka") - the general word for a bear, cognate to the Russian "медведь" ("medved' ") and can roughly be translated as "honey-eating" or "honey-knowing". The indo-european root "bar" or "ber" is tabooed and lost well before splitting the slavonic languages. And for meat-eating bears we say "стръвница" ("stravnitsa") - the word root is "стръв" (bait).
Please, pretty please, try to recall the word (or ask someone)! I am curious as well.
p.s. there is absolutely no such distinction neither in English nor in Russian (the two other languages I am fluent in).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Monday October 24 2022, @11:32AM
Thank you for that! That's really interesting!
I'm still stumped on my end, and the person I would've asked, my mother, has passed. It would likely have been something I came across as a youngster as part of the local dialect (which seems all but gone these days), or something in an old book I might've read. The regular word for bear in Swedish is "björn", from the older "beorn". For a "friendly" non-meat-eating bear there is "brummel" or "brummelbjörn", though that's quite obscure these days. No matter how much I wrack my brain I can't pull a word for the opposite. It doesn't help that English has been my main language for over half my life now either. I'll keep mulling it in the background and maybe something pops up.
... unless it's "angerbjörn", though that is used as a surname thus making it nigh impossible to dig for the original meaning. Hmmm.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Friday October 21 2022, @01:40PM (2 children)
Except the Panda, which is an herbivore. Most bears eat lots of plants, berries, etc. beyond the occasional meat snack. Who thought it was a good idea to feed an obviously omnivorous animal a nearly all meat diet?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Saturday October 22 2022, @02:21AM
Yeah, I'm wondering what they think polar bears eat in the wild. A whole bunch of seals would like a word with them.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Sunday October 23 2022, @06:26PM
Someone who said "We have enough food for people -- in fact, too much. So give any extras to the bear. I mean, to maintain that weight, they probably have to eat anything edible they can get their hands on." Or people who came up with the food logistics during the Japanese internment in the US [densho.org]:
And that's what the *cooks* had to deal with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2022, @07:10PM
It seems like they could have asked hunters/trackers about this too. Scat is one of the ways you track an animal. Bear scat it full of undigested seeds. You'd think they'd have examined fresh poo and seen that too along with whatever it looks like after eating salmon.
BTW, don't image search "bear scat" unless you have the strict safe-search option on.