|
|
Post by brobear on Feb 14, 2023 3:16:50 GMT -5
When spring comes and temperatures rise, and life becomes easier for most of the inhabitants of the Arctic, polar bears paradoxically face more difficult times. The ice on which they roamed during the winter has disappeared. The bears are superb swimmers and can remain in water continuously for many hours. Even so, they cannot swim for weeks on end. So now they come ashore. Here there is meat to be had but it comes in tiny units - ground squirrels and lemmings. These are minute helpings for a huge animal that a few months earlier was munching its way through pounds of seal blubber in a single sitting. But the polar bears, nonetheless, hunt for them with enthusiasm. Like the grizzlies, they also eat blueberries, cranberries, and crowberries. They dig for roots and chew the sedges. Even so, during the hard times of summer, they may need to draw on the fat reserves they accumulated during the winter days of plenty in order to survive. They may even get so desperate for meat that they will kill and eat cubs of their own species if their mothers do not keep them out of harm's way - and since they show no sign of recognition those they fathered, those cubs may be their own as well as those of others.
|
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Feb 14, 2023 3:37:48 GMT -5
The smallest of the bear family, the Malayan sun-bear (its name refers to a yellowish blotch on its chest) is hardly bigger than a large dog. It is about as vegetarian as the polar bear is carnivorous and spends a great deal of its time climbing in trees, looking for fruit. But it is also particularly fond of honey and will rip apart tree-trunks to get to a nest of wild bees. Foraging down on the ground it eats all kinds of things. It scoops up eggs and nestlings of ground nesting birds such as jungle fowl. It even tears open termite hills and licks up the soft-bodied larvae.
|
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Feb 14, 2023 3:57:37 GMT -5
Other bears - the Asian black bear, the North American black bear and the Andean spectacled bear - are all similarly omnivorous, wandering through their territories snacking on whatever might be in season and whatever they might find. But one member has started to specialise. The sloth bear is a particularly shaggy species that in the Indian subcontinent, from the foothills of the Himalayas in the north southwards across India to Sri Lanka. While it too takes a variety of animal and vegetable food, it has a particular taste for termites and it has already evolved special adaptations for collecting them. It has lost two of the incisors in its upper jaw and as a result has a gap in its front teeth. Its lips are naked and very large. And it has particularly big claws on its front feet. When it finds a termite hill, it first rips a hole in the side. Then it pushes its snout into the hole, purses its lips to form a long tube and sucks. The termites are hoovered out of their chambers and corridors in hundreds. If the bear continues down this evolutionary road, it may eventually reach the toothless extremes of the giant anteater, and then another omnivore will have followed the giant panda out on the high wire of specialism.
__________________________________________________________________________
There is so much more in this book I checked-out from a library - The Life of Mammals by David Attenborough. 2002.
|
|
