Andean Bear: The Bear with Many Names

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Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ebony Money and I'm Rick Schwartz. Welcome to Amazing Wildlife, where we explore unique stories of wildlife from around the world and uncover fascinating animal facts. This podcast is a production of I Heart Radio and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, in international nonprofit conservation organization which oversees the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. The next species were spotlighting, is known by several names. He's called the spectacle bear for the rings of light fur around his eyes, the mountain bear, a nod to its mountain habitats. This bear lives in South America in and around the Andes Mountain Range, hence the name Andian Bear. We will also be speaking with Dr Russell Van Horne, as San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance scientists who leads the Andian Bear conservation program in conjunction with our partners, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Filled Projects International, Manu National Park, Peru Verde Manu Endemic Station and Amazon Conservation Association. Rick, how is it that this bear has so many names? Well, Ebony, It's not uncommon for a species that can live in a wide variety of different countries and therefore cultures to receive different common names from these different areas. And this holds true for other species as well. I mean, for example, right here in the US, we have the mountain lion, the cougar, the puma, and the mountain streamer, and they're all the same species of cat, but it has received many common names due to the many different regions it inhabits. Now, in the case of the Andian bear or spectacle bear, it not only has to do with the different languages from different cultures, but also how it looks. The common name spectacle bear is in reference to the lighter color of hair that circles around the eyes, almost making it look like the bears wearing glasses. And then of course another term for glasses is spectacles. And because of the spectacle markings, this offers scientists the unique ability to identify each bear by it's if you will, mug shot or photo, so those markings that they're basically that sort of signature for the individual. The markings also give the bear ittts scientific name tremarctos or natas or decorated bear. Now, when it comes to the Andian bear, I have a number of questions with every species we explore. I approached the conversation with my natural curiosity, and I also try to imagine what people listening may want to ask, including my very curious seven year old son Rick. What are some of the topics will cover in our Andian bear conversation? Oh goodness, Ebany, there are so many things we can talk about, from their natural history to conservation. For instance, did you know Andyan bears can be rather vocal? I mean, at least for a bear. And we aren't talking about the classic growl or roar that movies and television used for bear noises. Andy, and bears communicate through squ eeks, shrills, and even gentle purr like sounds. Oh, and Ebony, you know bears can climb trees? Right? Yes, I think you're correct. Well, Andian bears don't just climb trees. They love to climb trees, and they do it so well. They can also forge for food up in the foliage. And get this, they will even make nest like structures or platforms in trees to take a nap. All of this activity in the trees has earned them the title of being a true arboreal or tree dwelling bear. Now this doesn't mean that they spend all of their time in the trees, but they are well suited for spending a lot of time in the trees. Oh and another interesting fact, these bears like to keep to themselves and tend to avoid humans. That makes them hard to find and challenging for scientists to study them. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say we bear we know anything about them, but it is fair to say we have more to learn. So the Andian bear is is known as the last of the short faced bears. What exactly is a short faced bear? I'm really glad you asked, Ebony, because I'm certain many people have never heard the term short faced bear. And to understand this term, we need to look back at the taxonomy of bears in taxonomy being the scientific study of classifying living organisms. In the case of the Andian bear, there in the subfamily tremark Toiney. Tremark Toiney is a subfamily of the ursa day or the bear family. Now, in this subfamily, Andy and bears are the only species alive today, but at one time this subfamily had several species, including the Florida Andian bear, North American short faced bear, South American giant short faced bear, and several others. But to get to the other part of your question, what is a short faced bear? Well, again it's based on the taxonomy, and often taxonomy classification is done by looking at bone structure and size along with tooth layout. In the case of bears and short face bears, things like the structure of the jaw, skull size, shape, and composition are all different enough to place the short faced bears in their own subfamily. Additionally, you can look at the muzzle of an Indian bear and see that it is shorter than other bear species, so there's a slight visual variance as well. So whatever happened to the other species of short face bears now the other short faced bear species all went extinct around the end of the Places scene epoch about eleven thousand and twelve thousand years ago, and this is a time when many large mammals such as mammoths ground sloths, which I mean those guys were huge and much larger short faced bears went extinct. There are several different theories as to why these larger mammals went extinct, but we don't really know for sure, do you? Scientists? Have any any theories about the Andian bear in why it survived and became the last of the short based bears. Well Ebony. With a mass extinction of many large species that came at the end of the place of the epoch, there were many smaller species that did survive, and one of those theories as to why smaller species thrived while massive species did not is that the changing climate of the earth at the time made it more difficult for these larger species to survive. In general, so the Andian bear is the only bear native to South America. Where exactly are they found? Yes, that that is correctivity. The Andian bear species is the only living bear species native to South America and their name comes from the fact that they often live in the cloud forests of the Andes Mountains and outlying mountain ranges. They can be found from Venezuela south through Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and into Bolivia. And like we discussed, they are aar boreal or well adapted for life in the trees, so they are found in the forests, but also they can sometimes wander into the shrub lands and grasslands near the forest. Rick I had a chance to visit the Antian bear habitat at the San Diego Zoo, and a couple of things really stood out to me, like the nest. What's the connection with the nests that you see in the habitat? Oh I love this question, ebity, because very rarely when we think about bears do we think about a nest or a platform in the trees. Most of us think of bears is living in dens or hollowed out trees or caves, right. But but our friend the Indian bear likes to do things a bit different. They love to eat plants that grow in the trees. Some fruits that they can even be found up there as well are part of their menu. So they will actually build a platform using sticks to allow them to reach the foods they like most and they will even sometimes catch a nap in that platform or nest that they have built. So honestly, it's pretty ingenious. And at the San Diego Zoo we provide them with the climbing structures, trees, branches, and other things that they can create platforms and nests for themselves. And one of the other things I noticed even the bears food was was elevated. What's the purpose of making the food somewhat more challenging to access. I wouldn't really say challenging because if you think about in their native habitats, Andian bears will eat fruits that grow in trees. Oh and romelias too, a type of plant species that will live on a host tree. So to get these foods, of course, the bear naturally has to climb, and as we discussed, they climb quite well. In fact, Andian bears have been known to sit in a tree for days waiting for fruit to ripen. And to be fair, they will also eat other fruits that grow on smaller plants, grasses, and even some small animals like rodents, rabbits, and birds. At the San Diego Zoo, where the bears are under human care, we could just place the food on the ground and put it in an habitat and call it a day. But we recognize the Indian bears are smart, they enjoy problem solving. They've evolved to climb and use their senses to find their food, so we recreate these experiences for them in their habitats. Yes, Rick, I did notice the the ease at which the the Anian bear climbed the branches while I was visiting the San Diego Zoo. So, how does the Andian bears climbing skills compare to other species of bears. Well, I think it's fair to say any that the Andian bear is an absolute pro compared to other bears when it comes to climbing trees. It's not uncommon for us to see videos of black bears here in North America climbing trees, or even young brown bears climbing trees. But for as much as we have seen pictures or videos of that happening, that's not where they normally spend most of their time. In fact, one might even consider it rare. But the Andian bear spends a lot of time in the trees, and that's what they're well suited for. Another thing stood out when I visited the Antian bear um, which is its size. I got to a good view and it seemed to me pretty small. How does the bear size compared to other bears? Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, ebany. I mean, when it comes to bears, Andian bears are on the smaller side compared to say, grizzly bears and polar bears. A male Andian bear can be about five and a half to six and a half feet in length from nose to rump. Where you compare that to a grizzly bear, they can go as far as nine feet from nose to rump, and an Andian bear can weigh around you know, two pounds up to three five pounds. Females are even smaller at one thirty two about and seventy six pounds. But again we compare that to the grizzly male, Well, they can weigh up to seven hundred to a thousand pounds. So yeah, Indian bears are a bit smaller. So Rick, what's the Indian bears threat or or threats in nature? Well, it's a great question, eany. The International Union of Conservation of Nature or i uc AND lists them as vulnerable, meaning they aren't endangered yet, but they are vulnerable to extinction. One of the biggest challenges they faces habitat loss and habitat fragmentation. And a big challenge of habitat fragmentation is it prevents the bears from finding each other for breeding purposes. This, of course impacts the ability than to add to the population. Other challenges they face include illegal hunting, also known as poaching, habitat loss due to mining, lumber operations, and farming. It is worth noting though, on the other side of all of these challenges, there are a lot of people doing some work right now to better understand the needs of the Indian bear and how we can reverse the current trend of the population decline. Coming up, we'll be talking to the head of our Indian Bear conservation program, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance scientists Dr Russ van Horn. But first this all right, Now, it's time for the San Diego Zoo Safari Park Minute, an opportunity for you to learn what's new at the Zoo. Welcome the newest member of the Condor Club. The three juveniles are critical to the recovery of the species and will contribute to our conservation efforts when they reach adulthood. These three chicks were given names by members of the Kumay Bands of San Diego. The Kumai bands include San Pasquell, Campo Kumai and Santa Isabelle of Kumai. These three birds were named metap my wom meaning high wind writer, poemon Cocker meaning far off flyer, and io pomont meaning flies through. They are representatives of their species, which are seen as symbols of power by indigenous North American people. Today we're learning more about andy and bears. Joining this conversation as someone very knowledgeable about the subject, Dr Russ van Horn as San Diego Zoo wild Life Alliance scientists and population sustainability He leads our Andyan bear conservation program. Hi us, Yeah, hello, thanks for asking me on sure things. So you've studied a lot of different animals in your career, including l bison, hyenas um. How did you end up studying Andian bears in Peru? It was definitely not part of a long term career plan. Just followed opportunities when they arose. Curiosity about wildlife, trying to figure out how things work, and then an interesting conservation that led me through different projects programs to the opportunity that rose for me to pursue my curiosity in a way that I thought I could actually help with conservation of Indian bears and other forest Mammo. So I left at the chance to join the San Diego Zoo wild Life Alliance. And what can you tell us about the Andian bear conservation program? Yes, it's one of the conservation programs in the Alliances Amazonia Hub. It's a long term program and it's very colled, but if we work with people inside and outside of the alliance, work with governmental agencies and other researchers and academics and community members. The overall goal is to support bear welfare and husbandry and zoos, of course, but the primary goal is to help provide the information and the tools for long term sustainable conservation action and planning in the Indian bear's range. And really we're trying to keep the options open for people as they work for sustainable coexistence between people and bears. That's fascinating. So the program is based in Peru. Why Peru? Yeah, we we collaborate with people across the bear's range, but we really do focus in Peru for our field work because it's thought that's where most of the bear habitat is left, and the most intact patches of habitat are left. The bear in Peru and throughout its lives in very diverse habitats and ecosystems, but Peru we think has most of it left. And governmental agencies and different non governmental organizations were interested in bear conservations, so it looked as Okay, if we go after this, maybe we can make a difference in the conservation for this bear. So the need existed, and and we thought maybe we could help fill that need. And another non biological reason for being interested in working Peru is that many of the cultures in the areas where the bear lives placed a lot of importance on the bear. So by working to conserve the bear improved, we would hopefully be also helping people to to conserve an element of their culture. Rust what else can you tell us about the end in bear's natural habitat, It's very diverse. They seem to be strongly linked to forests. They will go out into alpine gut lands or shrub lands, but they really seem to be tied to forests. But the forests very a great deal, from really dry, fairly open forests to very wet cloud forests. And it's really kind of impressive when you think about it, because this bears range naturally goes north and south about thirty degrees in latitude, and that's more than the contiguous United States, and that's that's almost as far north south as the distance from San Diego where I am now to the equator. So there's a lot of variation north south, and then that means there's a lot of variation in the amount of light change throughout the year, and there's also a big spread and elevation. We think these bears live at elevations that range more than three thousand meters in elevation or more than like ten thousand feet. So there they live in a lot of really diverse areas, but they seem to be pretty much linked to forest in or any of the diverse areas which there in which they're found. Are any of these in close contact to people. That's one of the challenges and kind of the opportunities for anti Barrick conservation is that right now we think that the the most important habitats for these bears tend to be the cloud forests, but there's no real way to test whether that is the has always been so because people have been living in the South American Indian countries for centuries. I mean, the Inca and other civilizations really changed a lot of the habitats before Europeans ever arrived, and so we don't know whether these cloud forests are the most important areas or whether that's where their bears can currently live because there are a fewer people there. Because it does seem as though an Antian bears live in close proximity with people, they tend to get into trouble. They do things like going and eating corn fields. And of course, if you're if you're a rural farmer and you're depending or you're counting on that cornfield to feed you chickens or to raise money, you might be kind of annoyed if a bear comes in and destroys part of it. And so the bears can live close to people, but when they do it kind of creates is friction with people, and so that's one of the challenges to figure out how can people and bears co exist together. At one point, Andy and bears were thought to be nocturnal, but I understand that more recent research suggests the possibility that that they may not be. Can can you tell us about these these developments. It's pretty interesting because it's sort of reflects how technology can change what we think we know about about the species. Because I think a lot of people um sort of concluded that the bears were nocturnal because you don't see them much. You see evidence that their bears out there. Maybe occasionally you would see a bear, but you don't act we see the bear itself, so you might think, well, I'm not seering them during the daytime, which is when I'm out for it, so they must be active at night. I think that's probably how people concluded that the bears are nocturnal. But once we had this new technology, these trail cameras, these camera traps, and you can put those out there in the forest where there's no human around, then we started seeing that while the bears are mostly active during the day, it must just be that they're really good at knowing when there is a human around and they avoid being seen. That makes them kind of a challenge to study, but the trail cameras have really really been a valuable tool for science. You mentioned the local people in the South American countries um where these bears are found. How are how are they locals assisting with with some of your research. We integrate with people from mostly from Peru in different ways. Long term, the whole that the information that we're collecting will help feed into governmental agencies at different levels, and we collaborate with a variety of private NGOs who manage conservation concessions some of those are are where some of our sampling areas are and those are outside of Manu National Park right now, and we're also connective research inside Manu National Park and in some man in countries there's really strong management and conservation and natural reasons by local communities. Um that difference that differs across countries and even within different countries. But really I'm the only North American in this program. All of our field staff are from the area where we work, and there are a lot of reasons for doing that. Part of it is that they're there, they should really be involved. We're providing opportunities for them and also training and mentorship. Long term, they would be great if our words capacity in the South American countries to to do all of this work on their own, and we hope we get there someday. What is the role of our our partners in this program. There is so much that we don't know, There's so much to learn, so much work to do that no no one organization, no one individual could ever do it on their own. And where the bear lives is so diverse, and so many different ecological contexts and so many different conservation contexts that really if we want to be affective, we have to work with partners together information and so part of it is sharing data's, part of it is sharing samples, and also to help develop really effective conservation plans, because we don't have the right or the responsibility to be telling people this is what we think you should do to conserve your bear. Oh we should be My opinion is um that our all should be to help them develop that for themselves. And how does the data collected by zoos contribute to conservation efforts. Initially, some of the work was just with demographic records that the zoo's different zoos have kept over their histories, because zoos keep track of which individuals live where, when they may, when they give birth, how long they live, and when they die. And that's really valuable in information because it can tell us something about what is the average lifespan and a zoo of an Antian bear, and that can provide a reference for what we might expect in the field. The patterns of births in Indian bears throughout the where they've been kept in various zoos suggests that there's pretty strong seasonality, so that if you're closer to the equator bears could give birth over most of the year because you go farther south towards the the lower edge of the range, perhaps down in Bolivia, they're probably only giving birth in a narrower point of both time, and that's something that would be very hard to learn from just field work. Also, when anyone goes to a zoo and they see a nandie and bear, they're getting a better look at that bear than we almost ever will in the field. And we're using information about what the bears look like to develop tools that think will be able to use in the field. So I'm collaborating with some people that run a project called Bear i d and these are a mix of bear biologists brought by or biologists and computer science experts that we're working a machine learning to see if we can automatically identify individuals of different bear species, and we hope that down the road will be able to also say the bear in this photo is a male, or the bear in this photo is a female, which is really hard to figure out for an in bears, and the or that would be able to take a photo from the field and say this month that bear wears two weighs two seventy pounds. Six months ago it weighed two d and fifty pounds. That would says, hey, what was that bear eating? It gained weight. The other thing we're doing is with samples and information from zoos is Um, collaborating with Dr Milan Kensick Watts, who is developing a genomics tool that using samples from pairs of zoos across North America and then some samples of bears from a couple of the range countries to develop this tool that will allow us to conduct really great genetic analysis using just a couple of hairs from a while bear. Right now, that's not possible, but these bears under human care provide reference. They're living natural history means MS and we can really learn from working with them. Well, Russ, it has been great talking with you. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you, and thank you for giving me the chance to talk about this really cool bear species. Yeah. I learned a lot and I enjoyed it, and we hope that you learned a lot about the bear with many names, the Andian bear. And be sure to subscribe and tune into next week's episode, in which we bring you the story of the land iguana with a very unique coloration and genetics that set it apart from all other land iguana species. I'm Ebene Mone and I'm Rich Schwartz. Thanks for listening. If you would like to find out more about San Diego Zoo Wild Like Alliance, please visit sdz w a dot org. Amazing Wildlife is a production of I Heart Radio. Our producer is Nikkia Swinton and our executive producer is Marcia to Peanut. Our sound engineer and editor is Amita Gnatra. For more shows from my heart Radio, check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M HM.