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Our mission is to:
- take care for all species of Bears.
- to educate visitors about all aspects and attributes of Bears
If you are webmaster please show us your support by linking to our website:
<a href="http://www.bearplanet.org"
title="Kodiak: Grizzly, Panda, Polar Bear">Bears - BearPlanet.org</a>
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Bears
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Bears, wolves, hyenas and wasels make up four
groups of carnivores that are related in their evolutionary descent
from the miacid. Miacid is a creatyre that lived 50 million years a go.
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The Kodiak and the polar bear are the largest country carnivore on ground.
All are predators and many still sit down daily to a meal of animal meat.
They must take their steak any any way they can find it, defend it
from competing predators and sometimes risk their own lives to get it.
Bears fact
Bears, like other carnivores, trace their pedigree back to the miacids,
small, snouted, weasellike animals that lived 50 million years ago. Some 38 million years ago bears began to
go their own evolutionary way. The first clearly bearlike animals was Amphicynodon; the first
true bear was Ursavus (both represented in the form of skulls, the only evidence available).
The modern genus Ursus appeared between five and ten million years ago.
They (ursids) are the heavyweights of the land varnivores and generally omnivores (omnivores = an animal that is both vegetable and animal food necessary has to survive)
, with a preference for vegetable food.
After a period of eating meat more or less esclusively, they became omnivores for still
not yet explained reason.
The giant panda departed the furthest from a strictly carnivorous diet until recently they
were thought to be strict vegatarians.
The polar bear with scant choice of food in the Arctic became largely carnivorous and developed
into an expert swimmer and stalker in order to hunt seals, its favorite prey.
The bears maintained the talents of some early miacids for
tree-climbing.
They may stand over 10 feet tall on its hind legs and weights
more than 680 kilogram (for example Alaskan kodiak bear or Artic polar bear).
The body weight varies between 25 and 800 kilograms, whereby the males become always clearly heavier than the females.
The skin is rather long and with most kinds in-colored, most brown or black.
The usually elongated lip accommodates 40 or 42 teeth depending upon kind.
Exceptions are the large Pandas with its remarkable black-and-white skin design and the white polar bear.
Bears are powerfull built creatures with small eyes and ears, large claws and a
slow, ambling gait that can quickly shift to surprising bursts of speed.
Bears can if necessary however up to 50 km/h fast run.
Usually they climb well (in particular the Malasyan) and can swim also excellently.
Some kinds hold a winter peace during the cold months.
Bears rely on a keen sense of smeel, as well as
curiosity, to locate potential sorces of food and detect their pray, particularly an acute sense
of smell that is at least a hundred times more sensitive than that of man.
They are relatively intelligent, resourceful animals with large, well-developed
brains and they are predators that live by taking preyand that eat other animals flesh.
They have agility, coupled with speed and strength, to overcome their prey once they
have flushed it, as well as jaws, teeth or claws capable of gripping and tearing flesh.
Since these animals do not need to chew quantities of vegetable matter for their nourishment,
their rear molars are not well developed.
Their simple stomachs are designed to handle the
easily digested, energy rich flesh of other animals.
Some of their diet is carrio,
but bears also hunt for mice, birds' eggs and insect. They also eat grasses, roots, berries and nuts
and will ignore angry bees to get at a honeycomb, one of their favorite treats.
Bears are born naked and helpless and
therefore thermally incompetent; they are totally dependent on the body
warmth provided by their mothers
and the den for the first few weeks
of life. By 10 days they
have a thin fur coat althought
their eyes are still closed
Thermoregulation is an extreme problem for very young animals. Bears are born in a highly altricial state -
i.e almost naked, blind and helpless. Their small size and lack of fur mean that they are
immediately sybject to rapid collingl in addition they are wet from the birth membranes and
have no insulating layer of fatty tissue. The mother has already minimized the risks considerably
by giving birth in a den, where the temperature is higher than that of the environment.
Nonetheless, it is still too cold for the young to survive without help. The female cleans and
dries the infant and then huddles it close to her own body. The infant stays in close contact with its
mother for a considerable time, until it is more able to cope with the cold.
Although bears are usually described as being born naked, they do have a light covering of hair which will act as
effective, warm boundary layer nex to the skin. Despite the actions of th emother, infants may still be
in serious danger of freezing.
However, young mammals are not totally denfenceless in this respect since they are usually supplied with areas of a special type of fatty deposit called
brown adipose tissue (BAT) and it is purely thermogenic in function.
Bears playing (play behaviour)
Play is an important behaviour for many mammals in which the young have
an extended period of parental supervision. It is unsurprising, therefore,
to find that many of the Carnivora have extensive play expression.
Three types of play (bears play) are recognized:
- Solitary
- Social with a conspecific
- Social with a member of another species
Solitary play usually involves the use of an inanimate object or parts
of the animal's own body. Solitary play is much more common in social
contexts between litter mates, mothers and their offspring, and also
among related young animals which are no longer travelling wih their mothers.
Bears may be seen chasing around for no clear reason and both giant pandas and American black
bears have been observed toboganning down snow-covered slopes.
Social play among conspecifics most often involves play-fighting;
running and chasing one another with little or no actual physical contact is
less common. Quite detailed observation of American black
bears, both in captivity and in the wild, have shown that play usually involves
sequences of behaviour which are commonly used in other
situations but which, during play, are terminated incomplete.
For example, play-fighting resembles real fighting in terms of the activities used
but never involves erection of the hair around the neck and shoulders, which
isalmost always seen during real contest.
Some behaviours: head-butting and muzzle-bitting are never seen in non-play contexts;
head-butting seems to act as an invitation to other animals to play.
However, play may also serve other functions since it is not solely restricted to cubs.
Adult male polar bears have been observed to indulge in playful interactions during which
both participants demonstrate mutually predictable and stereotypic behavioural sequences.
In general, it has been suggested that such a social play helps individuals to
refine their social behaviour and develop their ability to assess competitive
opponents in a non-threatening context.
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Polar Bears
Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) is the largest
meat-eating hunter
known to Eskimos as Nanook (the great white bear of the North)
and to millions of other people
as the polar bear |
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Panda Bear
The existence of this puzzling animal was
first revealed in 1869 by French Pere Jean Pierre Armand David.
He send back to Paris description about a new species that he named Ursus melanoleucus. One year
later Alphonse Milne-Edwards named the species Ailuropoda melanoleuca
or black and white bear, known today as Pandas. |
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Grizzly Bear
Grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) is a subspecies of the brown bear living in North America.
Today, almost all living brown bears with exception of the Kodiak are usually called Grizzly bear.
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Black Bear
Black bear (Ursus americanus) is a robbery animal species
from the family of the bears (Ursidae), living in North America.
In its homeland it is mostly called as black bear or Baribal.
In contrast to the rather feared Grizzly the black bear applies as harmless. |
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Big Bear
Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi), sometime called Big Bear or Big Brown,
is the largest of all the brown bears. With the size that exceeds 3 meter it
is the largest terrestrial carnivore. |
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Brown Bear
As with American black bear, brown bears (Ursus arctos) have been the subject of
considerable taxonomic 'splitting' into subscpecies, the 'grizzly' and
the kodiak are probably the best known. |
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Sloth Bear
Sloth bear (Ursus ursinus) are small and black, sporting a long,
shaggy coat; the presence of brown and gey hairs in the coat may give
the appearance of a tawny or cinamon colouration.
In he past this bear has been extensively hunted due to
its reputation for aggression and drop destruction. Today is suffering through
habitat loss due to a number of agricultural and development schemes. |
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Sun Bear
Sun bear (Ursus malayanus) is the smallest of the bears,
standing only 70cm at the shoulder and measuring 1.2 - 1.5m from nose
to rump. In the wild this bear is often cited as one of the most dangerous animals of
its range. |
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Spectacled Bear
Spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) is the only
species of bear to be found in South America, where is restricted to
the mountainous regions of Peru, Ecuador, Columbia and Venezuela.
Persecution and habitat loss due to human encroachment have led to a
decline in the range of this bear. In Peru it is hunted for its meat and fur,
and population fragmentation, resulting in the isolation of individuals,
has become a severe threat to their reproductive success. |
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Asiatic black bear
Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus) is medium-sized and usually uniformly black,
except for its light-coloured muzzle and a distinctive white chevron extending out
to the shoulders from the chest. In some areas, individuals, may appear to have a
more brown coloration. The ears appear large in proportion to the rest
of the head. The Asiatic black bear is suffering from the encroachment
of human activities into its habitat. |
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Koala bear
Koala bear (Phascolarctos cinereus) comes from Australia
and is not a bear but like its Australian counterpart the
Kangaroo is in fact a marsupial. They are native to Australia and
extremely cute but the only reason the Koala is referred to
as “koala bear” is because it resembles the adorable little teddy bears
that are known for being cute and cuddly. |
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Biological Classifications Bears Fact
- Name: The Bear
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Chordata
- Subphylum: Vertebrata
- Class: Mammalia
- Subclass: Theria
- Order: Carnivora
- Suborder: Caniformia
- Family: Ursidae
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