A national AP wire story about the death of a grizzly bear named Jughead at the Bronx Zoo this week has mangled basic facts about bear biology and distribution.
Dr. Christopher Servheen / USFWS
The 13-year-old bear — captured 12 years ago as a nuisance bear near Yellowstone National Park — died last week during surgery on an abdominal abscess. Named after a character in the “Archie” comic book series, Jughead left behind a family of bears named Archie, Betty and Veronica.
”Jughead was a wonderful, charismatic animal and he will be missed by all of our staff and visitors,” zoo director Jim Breheny told the AP.
SO WHAT DID IT SAY?
A common version of the story contained this section about the status of grizzly bears:
Grizzlies can stand 8 feet tall and weigh as much as 1,000 pounds, and are noted for being aggressive, unpredictable and dangerous.
Once ranging the American west from Mexico to Alaska, they have been reduced nearly to the point of extinction by civilization’s encroachment on their habitat, and now are concentrated in federal reserves in Montana, Wyoming, western Canada and Alaska.
Classified by the U.S. Interior Department as “threatened, ” grizzlies have remained fairly stable in the past 20 years, probably numbering fewer than 1,000 animals in the western United States, Thomas said. Loss of habitat and isolation, preventing gene exchange, are the biggest threats to their survival, he said in a statement provided by the zoo.
Here’s the problem:
Grizzly bears are members of the species Ursus arctos distributed across the entire Northern Hemisphere, from the mountains of Spain to the Russian Far East and through Alaska down into four western states (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and possibly Washington.)
Current worldwide population estimate is about 150,000 animals. Data and clickable maps posted online by Craighead Environmental Research Institute shows almost 95,000 bears in Eurasia and another 54,000 bears in North America. A big segment lives in Alaska, including an estimated 40 to 50 brown bears that spend their lives inside the limits of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, often venturing across five-lane boulevards to scope out suburban backyards. See a story on Anchorage’s Urban Bears.
- Rocky Mtn Bear Links
- USFWS grizzly bear page
- Interagency bear committee
- USGS grizzly bear team
The bears are not “near the point of extinction,” although habitat loss and fragmentation has eliminated the bears from most of their former territory in western United States and Mexico and knocked a population of more than 50,000 bears down to about 1,000. This decline is the reason the species was listed in 1975 as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act inside the contiguous Lower 48 states and intensely managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. An estimated 1,300 bears live on public and private land in a Rocky Mountain ecosystem that stretches from Glacier National Park to Yellowstone. This population has recovered to the point where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed that the bear be removed from the threatened list in the Greater Yellowstone area.
USFWS
What else is wrong?
Check a reliable description at ADFG Wildlife Notebook. While male brown bears (particularly bears that feast on coastal salmon runs in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest) can grow as much as 1,000 pounds and stand eight feet, most brown and grizzly bears tip the scales at much lower weights and sizes. Males average 400 to 600 pounds, with females a bit smaller.
And, while brown bears are certainly immensely powerful and intelligent omnivores physically capable of killing a human, and therefore should not be approached closely by people, the animals aren’t particularly aggressive and will go to great effort to avoid contact with people if given the chance. Dogs hurt far more people than bears do, as shown by various epidemiological studies.
Even in Alaska, where brown bears are distributed almost everywhere, fewer than one person gets killed and only a handful of people get charged per year. Living in Harmony with Bears, published by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, dispels many myths and offers good advice. Managing garbage and food responsibly, hiking in groups and making noise eliminates most danger from bears in advance.
Bottom line? Hundreds if not thousands of encounters with bears occur every year without people ever realizing it. The bears simply fade into the forest and keep focused on their Mission from God: Get as fat as possible before it snows.