Hillary Robison extensively researched army cutworm moths as part of the grizzly bear diet while a doctoral student the University of Nevada in Reno.... Robison hiked and horse-packed deep into the backcountry to find the steep, rock-strewn talus slopes favored by moths. The heat of the day drives the moths to seek cooler, moist shelter under large rocks broken off of headwalls and other rock formations above timberline. However, the sheltering rocks pose little obstacle for hungry bears.I'm turning over this rock this morning because moths suddenly appear in the last few lines of the previous post and it reminded me of something from a documentary Meade was watching on TV the other day.
April 26, 2018
"One group of scientists analyzed bear scat and revealed that a foraging grizzly could gobble 40,000 moths in a day."
"At that rate, the bear can consume about one-third of its yearly energy requirements in just 30 days..." (Yellowstone Gate).
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18 comments:
Put them all together and they spell mother.
Bears treasure their moths. And fortunately for lonely scientists, bears still shit in the woods, even in this time of Papal apostasy.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to eat one mothra?
At that rate, the bear can consume about one-third of its yearly energy requirements in just 30 days...
But what amount of energy does a bear expend just finding the moth, i.e. what is the net return? If cutworm moths are similar to other vegetarian insects their populations bloom and wither in cycles. In certain springs their numbers will explode, making them an obvious feast for their predators. In bloom years only a small proportion will evade predation long enough to spawn, producing a comparative famine in the following year.
Another thing to consider is the fact that, while grizzly bears as a species are generalists, individual bears tend to be specialists. Each kind of food resource they use takes a certain skill set to efficiently exploit. Some bears are more skilled than others at finding and exploiting a given food resource. For example, when the salmon run bears are well-known for catching them. However, some individuals will eat only the fat-laden skin and viscera, because to fill up on the whole salmon wastes fishing time and mitigates against the important goal of storing up fat reserves for the winter. Furthermore, the time used in eating a whole fish is time not spent defending the bear's fishing spot. The same is probably true of bears and cutworm moths — some can eat 40,000 a day and prosper, while others will only consume a fraction of that number and wind up expending more energy per moth eaten than is profitable.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to eat one mothra?
Probably, the bears are driven off by the rancid singing of those mini-gyaru.
News of the scatological.
I just got 240 hits, at least one literary, on the following search:
"Moth-eaten Bear Rug"
Payback is a bitch.
How does this help the polar bears survive global warming?
The Grizzly Bear Diet.
If all you can eat is moths and hikers, you will lose weight.
There's a whole book on animal droppings and their identification.
(searches various piles)
Animal Tracks, Peterson Field Guides, Olaus J. Murie
Forty thousand moths worth of wing powder sounds very disagreeable to swallow.
Forty thousand moths can't be wrong.
Peter Sellers moths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyzD8jE_-B4
Well hell, I be they could 'gobble up' 60,000 beetle bugs... but do you think bears LIKE to eat that many bugs?
Did the 'researchers' even think about what bears like to eat?
How do tell grizzly scat from black bear scat?
Grizzly scat has little bells in it.
Sounds like bullshit to me. Unless we're talking about whales and plankton, there's no way an animal could eat 40,000 of anything in one day. It's not about capacity, it's about time.
Ah! Molecular biologists, right?
Does the bear really shit in the woods ?
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