The daily lives of some of the most remote grizzly bears in the world are being recorded by the animals themselves through collar-mounted cameras, offering researchers a rare look at how the bears survive Alaska’s harsh North Slope, according to the Associated Press.
The project follows a small group of grizzly bears living on the frigid, treeless tundra near the Arctic Ocean, where researchers are studying how the animals find enough food to survive long winters.
Twelve of the roughly 200 grizzlies that roam the region have been fitted with collar cameras as part of a research effort led by Washington State University and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
The videos provide short but revealing snapshots of daily bear life, including playing or sparring with other bears, gnawing on caribou, eating berries, napping along beaches and swimming in ponds in search of fish.
The bears hibernate for about eight months of the year, leaving a narrow window to build up enough fat to last through winter.
“They really have a really short window to obtain enough food resources to pack on enough fat to survive that period,” said Washington State doctoral student Ellery Vincent, who is leading the project with state wildlife biologist Jordan Pruszenski.
Researchers are closely examining what the bears eat throughout the year and how their diet changes with the seasons.
“We’re interested in looking at kind of a broad scale of how they’re obtaining the food that allows them to survive through the year and what exactly they’re choosing to eat,” Vincent said.
One focus is whether and how often the bears hunt musk oxen. About 300 musk oxen live on the North Slope, Pruszenski said, but that population is not growing.
Footage from the first year of the study shows the bears emerging from hibernation and feeding on carcasses of caribou or musk ox that died during winter.
They later prey on caribou calves.
As the tundra greens up, the bears shift their diet toward plants, especially blueberries and soapberries, also known as buffaloberries.
Unlike salmon-fed bears farther south that can reach up to 1,000 pounds, these Arctic grizzlies are much smaller, topping out at about 350 pounds, Vincent said.
To initially place the collar cameras, researchers tracked the bears by helicopter last May.
Pruszenski fired tranquilizer darts from the air while Vincent tracked injection times and determined when it was safe to approach the animals on the ground.
The collars were carefully adjusted to allow room for weight gain without slipping off as the bears moved through rugged terrain.
“It is not difficult, but there is a lot of thought that goes into making sure the collar is adjusted properly,” Vincent said.
The bears were darted again in August to replace the collars and in September so researchers could download data and measure weight gain and body fat.
After the camera collars were removed, the state wildlife department replaced them with GPS collars.
That GPS data could help determine how oil-field development affects the bears and identify winter denning areas that oil companies must avoid when building seasonal roads between drill sites.
Each camera can record up to 17 hours of video.
During spring and summer, the collars captured four- to six-second clips every 10 minutes.
In the fall, as daylight shortened, clips were recorded every five minutes during daylight hours.
Even with their short length, the clips offer insight into how the bears survive across the vast North Slope, an area covering about 94,000 square miles but home to roughly 11,000 people.
Nearly half of the population lives in Utqiagvik, the nation’s northernmost community.
“One thing that’s really nice about these bears is that when they’re foraging on a particular food they tend to do that one thing for a long period of time, so these bears will spend pretty much their entire day eating, so the chances of us actually seeing what they’re doing are pretty high,” Vincent said.
The cameras also recorded a brief encounter between a bear and a pack of wolves shortly after the bear emerged from hibernation in May.
Because the bear was not feeding at the time, there was no conflict, Vincent said, and later footage showed no wolves nearby.
“I think they both decided that it wasn’t worth it, so they just looked at each other, then moved on,” Vincent said.
The study is expected to continue for two more years, with plans to expand the project by adding cameras to 24 additional bears.