The summer of 2017 is going to be a bad year for the miller moth eating bears of the Colorado Rocky Mountains (note: black bears only - there are no grizzlies in Colorado). It seems there was a late freezing rain/frost that killed many if not most miller moth grubs this year. I normally experience an onslaught in the migration as I'm on their path from the eastern plains to the mountains. Normal years I see dozens per night from June 1 to July 15, several somehow squeezing into my house each day. This year there were essentially zero miller moths.
Reminds me of going to summer camp as a child in Estes Park (north of Boulder). Every summer, dozens of moths would inhabit the cabins, attracted to kids' headlamps as we read books before bed. Kind of disincentivized people to stay up reading, and we all went to bed straightaway. Can't imagine there not being an armada of moths waiting in the wings.
Assuming you are not being sarcastic-there are no meetings. What I have seen is that they do extensive studies to observe how the Bears exist in their natural habit and implement policies to keep these behaviors in place. Everything from making sure highway construction noise levels don't interfere with hunting patterns to removing problem bears when they display aggression towards humans.
From my experience with the Yellowstone bear managers I have talked to, they attempt to connect with the grizzlies in their youth as cubs. As the cubs grow older, the managers are able to promenade alongside them, join them at meals, and even camp alongside them at night with their future bear families. It establishes a human connection with the bears so they are one with the park.
Extraordinarily stupid is kind. This behavior is what gets bears killed. I'm glad I was not there, or I'd have used the bear spray in my car on this stupid family, which yes is assault so I'd have properly been put in jail. But just, incredibly stupid people who have no concept of nature and don't care to have one, so I like the imagination of spraying this stupid family with pepper spray.
>> "How do they get near without getting attacked and driven away?"
The National Park service usually assigns the bear manager a herd of Jackalope when camping with the bears. These Jackalopes distract the bears from the presence of the humans.
While this approach is very effective in National Parks such as Yellowstone, problems have recently arisen in other Grizzly-inhabited areas, notably near the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat wildernesses, due to declining Jackalope populations.
Efforts are underway to replace the Jackalope herds with a single baby moose, or in some cases as many as three baby meese, but I can't vouch for the efficacy of this technique.
Interesting, had no idea. And why exactly do they do all this? To make them less wild, less dangerous for visitors? Has there ever been any protests against it from e.g. nature groups?
That post is sarcasm. Wildlife managers want to teach bears that humans are not a food source and should be avoided. Otherwise the bears can get aggressive and may even have to be killed. It's as much or more about managing human behavior as it is bear behavior. Good read:
"managers strive to prevent bears from learning to associate people and human spaces with food by providing bear-resistant food storage and garbage receptacles and enforcing their use."
"[...] managers may use techniques called aversive conditioning to teach bears that human spaces are unpleasant. This can include noisemakers, shooting them with beanbags, or capturing and releasing them."
" If they have to enter the pen of a captured animal, such as a bear, they wear a bear-urine-scented bear costume. The point of all this is to disassociate themselves as a source of food or care for the animals. Once released, they want these wild animals to avoid people as much as possible. "
Being desensitised to humans is not necessarily a problem. The problems occur if humans are seen as threats (which they probably will if they are unused to humans), or more importantly, if humans are seen as a food source. That's when things easily become dangerous. As long as the bear managers don't bring snacks to their meetings, it should be OK.
America is paying the cost of demonizing fat and glorifying carbs in big way. Obesity is a huge crisis. There is no solid science behind fat is bad theory.
Findings like this is why I find it very unpleasant when people start talking about destroying whole species because they are pests to humans.
The latest one I've read about is the idea that we need to get rid of all mosquitos. They are pests to us but I wonder how many other species depend on them for food and how will the mosquito's extermination affect the web of life.
The particular species of mosquito that carries disease and bites humans is just 3% of ~3,500 different species of mosquitos.
So in the case of mosquitoes we absolutely do not want to eradicate all mosquitoes, just a very specific sub-population, which by the way, are the most deadly animal to humans in the world. Malaria is likely responsible for killing a single digit and possibly double digit percentage of all humans that have ever lived. Mosquitoes have literally killed billions of people since the dawn of time.
So that's the reality of the situation. If we are wiping out species, might as well do one like mosquitoes which are a nuisance, bring disease and do not have some kind of monopoly in their biological niche. Anything that eats mosquitoes also eats other bugs.
“I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,”
We know what happens: evolution. The idea that the whole thing will totally collapse because you made one change is ridiculous and frankly utterly unsupported by the evidence, not least our understanding of this poor optimization algorithm driven by random chance.
I frankly always find these comments unpleasant because they seem to come exclusively from people sitting in some air-conditioned building miles away from a full 5 m^2 trees that they got to riding a 2 ton behemoth on tarmaced streets that casually reaches speeds no animal ever could powered by the remains of dinosaurs. Yeah I wonder how that affected "the web of life". It's a fashionable form of NIMBY except these people are not arguing from a position of naked self-interest but ignorance.
It's just as silly to assume that everything will be fine if we lose one species as it is to assume that everything will collapse. These questions need to be asked and studied, not just dismissed with a sneer either way.
It can take a long time to balance back out. Something will develop to fill the empty niche. Things will be fine in the end for nature. But it might take 10,000 years for things to stabilize again, and I don't want to wait that long :)
The topic of global eradication of mosquitoes (and the implication of that) is extraordinarily common. The frequent argument is no species is known to subsist entirely on mosquitoes, implying it may have no or negligible implication on the ecosystem at large.
You do not need to go that drastic. One could consider significant reduction in numbers, even staying narrow to a small set of subspecies (e.g. deer ticks which are much more numerous this year), instead of full extermination.
This happens in nature, too. Predators and prey numbers can take big swings with no humans to blame.
So the way they come to the 40K number is since each moth is about 1/2 calorie, and the bear requires at least 20k calories a day, then they must eat 40k moths/day. Hmm
I read it as just telling us that 40k moths per day at 1/2 calorie each = 20k calories. They just did that math for us. Beyond that, they carelessly omitted the info about how the 40k number was estimated. But I'm not sure. Definitely unclear mediocre writing in that sense.
Part of what's missing from this is an explanation of how bears feed before they go into hibernation. Bears are opportunistic in the extreme when preparing to hibernate - they feed single-mindedly on the easiest, most plentiful sources of calories they can find. There's actually some evidence to suggest that the bears have a means of knowing what's calorie rich (maybe through flavor? I dunno). It's well documented that salmon-fed Alaskan bears rarely eat the whole fish - they just yank off and eat the skin, which has the most fat and, consequently, the highest calorie-to-volume ratio.
They obliquely refer to this with the example about the black bear eating moths until full, then going off to nap. He found a good source of calories, ate his fill, then stopped because he couldn't eat anymore.
Seriously, counting moths in scat contributed to the estimate:
White made that estimation by watching grizzlies with a scope for up to 14 hours per day, while writing his dissertation on the animals at Montana State University-Bozeman. He also counted how many dead moths he could find in each bear “scat,” or pile of poo, and multiplied that by the number of times these bears defecated.
I don't think it's just the Yellowstone area. In Jasper I've seen bears doing the same sort of the rock-flipping scavenging. The sheer number of moths they eat is pretty surprising though, I never would have suspected bugs to be such a big food source for bears.
My question is this. Why would pesticides on the farms that wipe out a lot of these moths be causing a problem?
The bears were there before the farms. If the farms are creating a lot of new moths that weren't otherwise there, wouldn't the pesticides be bringing things back into equilibrium?
I am really against using pesticides and I try to eat only organic products, but I am just wondering why no one else seems to be talking about this. Those mass quantities of moths being there isn't natural in the first place.
The bears were there before the farms. If the farms are creating a lot of new moths that weren't otherwise there,
Another possibility is the moths were there before the farms as well, and the land they lived on now happens to have been turned into farmland. If that is the case than it's not as likely anymore that pesticides would bring an equilibrium. Maybe there were even more moths before it the land was one huge monoculture. (just spraying ideas here, I don't know what kind of land moths prefer nor if it really is a monoculture there)
I'd rather know why people disagree than see my post silently downvoted, so I'll elaborate.
The idea of a "natural equilibrium" or some such is mostly a misconception. It's a misleading way of thinking especially in the long term. Conditions change, organisms adapt to the changes, but changing one condition of many back to a previous state (e.g. by getting rid of moths) doesn't mean that organisms that have adapted to that condition will somehow "roll back" their adaptation. Instead, the new change will necessitate a new adaptation.
In this case, whitebark pines have been a major source of food for yellowstone bears, but have been in decline due to mountain pine beetles. Their season begins earlier and earlier as the air temperature rises, and their generations grow larger and larger, their life spans longer and longer.
This means that if you wipe out the moths, bears won't realistically go back to eating what has historically been their diet. Instead, they will have to adapt in some other way, for example by migrating up the mountains where it is colder (less beetles), start harassing humans, eat some other abundant bug etc.
Bears are good at foraging, though, and will seemingly eat whatever they find, so they may just find another source of food near their habitats when the moths are gone.
Bears' other food sources have been in decline due to climate change, and they have adapted to the new conditions. There is no natural equilibrium to somehow return to when the moths are gone, just the continuation of what is actually a pretty chaotic process that doesn't naturally tend to a particular state.
That seems like an extraordinary claim. If the bears were eating moths for 10 hours straight, they'd have to catch and consume more than one moth every second to hit that number... I must be vastly underestimating the amount of moths in these caves or the amount they move around.
The article only describes them being eaten one by one, and does not describe how massive numbers are being eaten at once. The question seems reasonable-- how is the number 40,000 arrived at? Do you know? The article feels hand-wavy and light on sources and details. This feels to me like the kind of number that someone arrived at by assuming that a bear might eat its entire caloric intake in moths and then dividing 20k calories by 0.5 per moth, so it could be up to 40000 moths.
There's a sign on waterless urinals all over the place that claims it saves "up to" 40000 gallons of water per year. It'd have to be running non-stop 24/7/365 for that to be true. There's an ad that I hear playing on NPR sometimes about a container rail train that gets "up to" 500 miles per gallon. Just keeping the lights on uses more gas than that. These "statistics" don't pass the smell test, and this story feels similar to me.
The claim is that a train moves a ton of freight at 470 miles per gallon.
> Trains can move a ton of freight over 470 miles on a single gallon of fuel. [0]
The claim isn't that the whole train goes that distance in a single gallon. Each train can carry thousand to tens of thousands of tons of freight. So the train would need thousands to tens of thousand of gallons to go those 470 miles.
You might think that CXS's numbers are cherry picked, but this matches closely with the numbers of the US rail road industry as a whole which was 435.88 ton-miles per gallon of fuel [1]. The reason that trains are so efficient is that a relatively low speed train on steel wheels with steel rails minimises friction losses[2]. Once the train gets going it doesn't take much to keep it going.
I did some quick searching and found a Newsweek article with the same claim referencing a study where:
"White made that estimation by watching grizzlies with a scope for up to 14 hours per day, while writing his dissertation on the animals at Montana State University-Bozeman. He also counted how many dead moths he could find in each bear “scat,” or pile of poo, and multiplied that by the number of times these bears defecated."
>It'd have to be running non-stop 24/7/365 for that to be true.
The federal standard for gallons per flush for urinals is 1 (with some older models using 5 times that). If we're assuming, they're accessible 365 days/year, that's 110 flushes/day. Seems a little generous, but it's nowhere near as far off as you're claiming.
I remember the gypsy moth invasion of the 1980s. You could peel a few thousand off of one tree in my backyard. I have no trouble believing a determined bear could eat 40,000 a day if they were congregated like that.
The rail freight ad copy read on NPR was actually something like "Our trains can move a ton of freight 500 miles on a gallon of fuel." That ton-miles/gal stat makes a lot more sense when you realize that trains are VERY heavy. It's like comparing passenger-miles/gal for a car and a 747.
>The article only describes them being eaten one by one
From my reading, the article barely describes them being eaten at all. The black bear "licking moths off his arms" might reasonably be collecting a few at a time. Where does your interpretation of "one by one" come from?
> Just keeping the lights on uses more gas than that.
Can you elaborate on this?
One gallon of diesel = ~41kWh. Assuming 30% conversion efficiency that gives us 14kWh. Assuming a 50mph speed to traverse 500 miles means we need to keep the lights on for 10 hours, giving us a power budget of 1.4kW. I don't know what kind of lights locomotives carry but that seems like an awful lot.
locomotives have two headlamps around 200W, and two ditch lamps (the ones at the bottom near the rails) of 350 watts each. That's 1.1KW already, plus any interior lighting and conversion losses from the diesel genset.
Also average freight train speed is tracked and its consistently less than 25mph:
Note however that fuel efficiency is almost always given in mpg per freight ton, in which case the power usage of the lights would be amortized over the considerable mass of the train. >400 mpg per ton is not uncommon on a train.
It occurred to me that elevation change could have huge impact on those calculations. More back of the envelope stuff: a 5k ton train requires 13.6kWh to ascend 1m. If such elevation changes are common that would quickly dwarf small values like the power consumption of lights.
I'd read it as implying the opposite: that there are 40,000 moths out there who will wind up in a bear's stomach tonight. Like "some 40,000 people per day are hit by a car"; you wouldn't take that as meaning one car hit 40,000 people.
"That means that 20,000 calories of just moths per day can be consumed by "A" rock-turning grizzly bear."
How can you possibly read this and think this was about the whole bear population?
"Hit by cars" means multiple cars. "Hit by a car" suggests one car. We're often sloppy, and often there's an implicit understanding that contradicts what's said directly. Clearly this is silly, one car can't do that so we interpret.
Neither figure seems particularly compelling here, of its "eaten by bears" it seems way too small if it's "eaten by a [single] bear" it seems too big.
Depends how you read it. If you take the numbers to be each moth will end in the stomache of a single bear, it still works. Yes, that is a silly way to see it, since bears probably don't share meals. But it does work with the numbers.
We're constantly hearing how fats are bad for us and we should eat a low fat diet. The article is overstating that fact. A better statement should say that the overeating of fats is bad for us. Eating NO fats would certainly be bad for people. Everything has to be eaten in moderation.
I'd be more inclined to grant linguistic leeway if the parent themselves hadn't jumped on someone else's turn of phrase.
Nutrition science has figured out some things to a high probability. It's still unsure and mystified by others. Don't throw the former out because the latter exists.
You're right, but I tend to think oversimplifying in the opposite direction to the trends of the last half century or so is warranted. The biggest problem I'd say we're facing today is people categorizing food into good and bad buckets, even if there is some truth to it.
I concur, but where I disagree is the sentiment "stop relying on others to tell you what to think!"
In order to fix errors and optimize, we need information. Trying to reason about a problem without adequate information is like trying to fix a bug when the only information you have is your QA folks coming back and saying "There's a bug."
Suppose you don't know whether something is good or bad for your health. Other people are eating it, so it's probably not insta-deadly, but you suspect that eating too much of it might be bad in the long term. Meanwhile, some people are telling you that it's actually essential for good health (e.g. cholesterol), and some are even worshiping it as some kind of superfood (e.g. wine). Food science is a mess.
So you eat a little bit of it just in case it's essential for good health, but not too much of it in case it turns out to be bad in large quantities. Basically, you hedge your bets.
Wash and repeat for nearly every type of food that exists.
Bears, like true omnivores, eat bugs and fruits and animal flesh and grass and practically anything to fill their bellies. Bears also, like true omnivores, can't get atherosclerosis from things they consume.
Humans, feeding on primarily fat based diet get atherosclerosis very often. Best epidemiological/history research on that topic is done on Inuits where remains of children showed atherosclerotic plaques in the vessels - their diet, although not ketogenic, contained mostly animal fats and proteins. Other mechanistic studies proved that direct causal mechanism exists but the same thing happens also with sugary diet, or essentially any diet with a caloric surplus (highest effect of course with highly caloric diets or diets rich in cholesterol over long timespans).
Essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6), on the other hand, are abundant in animal flesh (if we ignore plant oils). Human reliance on these sources definitely implies we are omnivores but with a certain complex twist.
Given the young age of nutrition science, lack of personalized methods, and flawed epidemiological studies (for example, epidemiological studies condemning meat and dietary cholesterol ultimately fail, on the other hand, studies showing that dietary cholesterol has no effect on basline cholesterol are methodologically flawed), a skeptic would conclude we still know little when it comes to long consistent living and the effect of diet on health. We do know a lot about intervention on sick people though. Practically any diet that is more healthy than a diet sick people practice works, best one being the one with highest nutrient to calories ratio (foods that have huge volume but low calories tend to have that characteristic and its mostly just plants - hard to overeat and create a caloric surplus), which is a plant-based diet. Still, it's questionable how this works long term (what's the source of fatty acids? where's B12 etc.).
I've read studies that discuss excess cellular energy as the cause of metabolic disease, but are there any studies on athletic people eating high calories over long periods? That is, would Michael Phelps' 10k calorie per day cause a problem, even if he uses all 10k? Because there would be spikes unless one is meticulous about eating small meals over the day.
The Nurses Health Study (NHS) [1][2] is considered one of the best sources of long term data on factors affecting health due to its size.
Regarding dietary fat intake and risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) [3] following 80K women over 14 years, they failed to find a significant correlation between total fat intake and CHD. The linked summary discusses the relative risks of different fats (limit saturated, and completely avoid trans), but it essentially comes down to calories being replaced by carbohydrates. Note that foods labeled low-fat or fat-free do tend to have more sugar.
Another NHS study following 40K women over 8 years[4] showed only a weak correlation between fat intake and weight gain. The take away again is probably to care more about which fats. Unsaturated fats tend to be healthier than carbohydrates. Saturated fats tend to be more unhealthy, and transfats should be completely avoided.
The linked article actually describes limitations with low carbohydrate diets. Attempts to make up yhe caloric deficiency with only protein is bad as the body struggles to keep nitrogen balance.
Given plenty of carbohydrates, it is possible to survive long term on very limited supply of essential fatty acids as well as proteons.
The bears would probably eat other stuff but those aren't readily available due to human activity. (Like introducing giant wolves not native to the area.)
