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Grizzly Bears Are Mostly Vegan

But humans made them more carnivorous.

On the subject of grizzly bears, the San Francisco Call—a short-lived newspaper that went out of print in 1913—wasn’t what you’d call kind. Describing the 1898 downfall of a California grizzly nicknamed Old Reel Foot, a supposedly 1,350-pound “marauder and outlaw,” an unnamed journalist cataloged the bear’s sins.

Despite its drama, the account was typical for the time. Especially in the years following the Gold Rush, newspapers and other historical records billed California grizzlies as an unusually meat-loving, bloodthirsty bunch. If California grizzlies were ever anything like the horrors our predecessors made them out to be, they didn’t start out that way. Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly 90 percent vegan, as Alagona and his colleagues found in a study published this week.

The California grizzly isn’t the only wild creature whose diet humans have made more meat-centric. Coyotes and condors also boosted their carnivory after the arrival of Europeans. In modern times, Charles Robbins, a bear biologist at Washington State University, and his colleagues have documented brown bears in Yellowstone beefing up their consumption of elk calves when native vegetation and fish grow scarce—due in part to human activities, along with diseases and pests that people introduced. Mairin Balisi, an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist at the Alf Museum who’s studying the diets of urban carnivores, suspects that similar changes may be playing out in today’s raccoons and rats—maybe foxes and bobcats too.

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The Atlantic

Even hibernating grizzly bears have a circadian rhythm

There is a pattern to when we wake up and get tired over a 24-hour period, scientists call it the circadian rhythm. Most other animals experience it too.

As winter arrives with its shorter days, grizzly and black bears begin their long naps, called hibernation. During this time bears will still move about a bit, but they don’t eat while hibernating.

Scientists at Washington State University were curious how grizzly bears’ circadian rhythms are affected during hibernation and conducted a study. What they found was although the animals are much less active, the energy their bodies produce still grows and fades over the course of a day as if they were awake, but at a much lower level.

Co-authors on the study include WSU graduate student and first author Ellery Vincent as well as Blair Perry (biological sciences) and Charles Robbins (environment and biological sciences), and Joanna Kelley of University of California, Santa Cruz. This research received support from the National Science Foundation and the Bear Research and Conservation Endowment at WSU.

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WSU Insider
The Missoulian
Billings Gazette

Early spring heat waves may be melting PNW water supply

Increasingly frequent spring heat waves are prompting premature snow melts across the Pacific Northwest, jeopardizing a key water source for area residents, a new study has found.

Successive stretches of unseasonable heat have been occurring earlier in the year in a region that depends on snowpack for summer water, according to the study, published Wednesday in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

“Short-term events like heatwaves have had an under-appreciated impact on accelerating snow melt, and cumulatively, they can amplify each other,” lead author Luke Reyes, a doctoral student in Washington State University’s School of the Environment, said in a statement.

Heat domes, weather events in which the atmosphere traps hot ocean air, triggered record temperatures that rose to nearly 122 degrees Fahrenheit across the Pacific Northwest in late June 2021.

So extreme was this event that British Columbia endured severe floods in several snow- and glacier-fed watersheds, as well as a large rock avalanche, the authors noted.

While the researchers had intended to examine the snowmelt caused by that single event, they ended up finding that much of the region’s snowpack was already gone before the heat dome arrived.

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The Hill
Phys.org
Northwest News Radio
The Columbian
KOMOnews.com

 

3 climate impacts the U.S. will see if warming goes beyond 1.5 degrees

As world leaders gather at COP28, the annual climate change negotiations held in Dubai this year, one number will be front and center: 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s the amount countries have agreed to limit warming to by the end of the century.

Currently, the world is on track for just under 3 degrees Celsius of warming (more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. While a few degrees of difference may seem small, climate research shows that every tenth of a degree can have a profound effect when it comes to the dangers posed by extreme weather.

“We’re not destined for some catastrophic climate,” says Deepti Singh, who is an assistant professor at Washington State University. “We know that we can have a future that is more equitable and less volatile if we limit the warming through our actions today.”

1. At 1.5 degrees of warming worldwide, the U.S. will heat up even faster
When scientists use numbers like 1.5 degrees Celsius to measure climate change, it represents an average of all the annual temperatures worldwide. That average masks the fact that some parts of the planet are heating up faster than others.

“The U.S. has already warmed at a rate that’s higher than the global average,” says Singh. “We’re warming at a rate that’s 60% higher than that.”

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NPR.org

Listen to the NPR Morning Edition story (with transcript).

National Climate Report: 5 Trends for the Pacific Northwest

Following the release of the federal National Climate Assessment last week, experts in Washington state say that although the window for countering the negative impacts of climate change is narrowing, there’s still time.

The trend is clear: Earth is warming because of our longstanding reliance on fossil fuels.

As our cars, buildings, refineries, large industries and power plants burn fossil fuels, emitting harmful and noxious greenhouse gasses, the planet will continue to warm, according to the federal government’s latest National Climate Assessment, published last week. Like the rest of the world, the Northwest is at risk. Washington, Oregon and Idaho are home to some 14 million people and 43 Native American tribes. The region is already experiencing climate change and more will come in the decades ahead, the state’s climatologist and one of the report’s authors told The Seattle Times.

States like Washington are scrambling to cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and painlessly as possible, with mixed degrees of success and local opposition. Others resist the change or even lay the groundwork for the continued reliance on the fossil fuels that have brought us to this point.

The faster the U.S. and the rest of the world cuts emissions, the quicker the risks diminish, the report says. The immediate benefit — and the benefit to future generations — will “far outweigh” the costs those changes would impose.

We still have time to shape our future, for better or for worse.

“Although the window is narrowing, it’s still open,” said Deepti Singh, a climate scientist with Washington State University and one of the assessment’s many authors.

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Seattle Times
GovTech.com