Yellowstone Bears Eat 40K Moths a Day in August
yellowstonepark.com
yellowstonepark.com
The bears effectively scoop the moths from the rocks using their claws. It's one of the most caloric dense foods they have.
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.
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.
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/humanbearinteractions.htm
"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."
This is also very good:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/bears
" 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. "
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/05/yellowsto...
Basically, the grizzlies there build up on moths and nuts. The moths are 65% body fat.
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.
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.
[1] - https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquit...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/climate/mass-extinction-a...
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
“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,”
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.
Mandatory George Carlin link: "The planet is fine; humans are fucked" https://youtu.be/YawTvnyoqbU?t=77
This happens in nature, too. Predators and prey numbers can take big swings with no humans to blame.
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.
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.
http://www.newsweek.com/grizzly-bears-can-eat-40000-moths-da...
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.
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)
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.
On how bears adapt to the lack of pine seeds (mostly by eating other stuff rather than migrating): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4063492/
On how there are more mountain pine beetles (because of temperature increases): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22504550
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.
> 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.
This is CXS's calculation [0]
> Schedule 750, Lines 1+3, Diesel Fuel Consumed (freight + switching) = 487,540,790 gallons
> Schedule 755, Line 110, Revenue Ton-Miles = 229,562,353,000245,212,180,000 RTM
> RTM per gallon = (229,562,353,000 RTM / 487,540,790 gals) = 471 RTM/gal
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.
[0] - https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/the-csx-advantage/fue...
[1] - http://www.factcheck.org/2008/07/fuel-efficient-freight-trai...
[2] - http://www.ctls.uconn.edu/do-csx-trains-really-move-1-ton-of...
"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."
http://www.newsweek.com/grizzly-bears-can-eat-40000-moths-da...
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.
See: https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/the-csx-advantage/fue...
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?
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.
Also average freight train speed is tracked and its consistently less than 25mph:
https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
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.
Seems to imply up to 40k/bear, but doesn't give much more for details.
It mentions moths are about a half a calorie each, so just from the moths a bear can consume 20,000 calories/day.
Sorry for being cheeky but the parent literally just addressed your question.
"It is estimated that an ambitious bear may consume in excess of 10,000 moths per day, with some estimates ranging as high as 40,000 moths per day."
"One group of scientists analyzed bear scat and revealed that a foraging grizzly could gobble 40,000 moths in a day."
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.
So, I don't find the stat too far-fetched.
Why does the article say this?
When will the anti-fat brigade stop?
Still an insightful look into possible environmental cycles we've missed because we have devastated the North American bear populations for centuries.
Different types of fat have different nutritional effects and should be considered as different nutrients.
The health of a diet can only be considered as a whole, not bit individual contributors.
"Food A is good for me and Food B is bad for me" is not how health works.
Overly reductionist statement and as inaccurate as what you're arguing against.
There are absolutely foods we know to be bad for humans.
You're not wrong, but I definitely understood the parent comment's point.
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.
Your oversimplifying what I said.
As it happens, I generally favor a holistic approach to nutrition too.
I don't know what to think anymore...
Just eat a tiny bit of everything, and make sure you get regular exercise.
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."
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.
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.).
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurses%27_Health_Study
[2] http://www.nurseshealthstudy.org/
A certain degree of fat is essential. People have been reported to actually starve on very high protein/very little fat diets.
Given plenty of carbohydrates, it is possible to survive long term on very limited supply of essential fatty acids as well as proteons.
Seems to me the fact is that bears usually eat other stuff but those aren't readily available (likely due to human activity).