Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an interesting and precarious place to live; while you might be the boss of your local environment, you also depend on the functioning of an entire ecology. Rae Wynn-Grant is a carnivore ecologist who studies how large predators migrate, feed, reproduce — and especially how they interact with humans. We talk about the diverse social structures of different species of carnivores, how they find mates, and how they diversify their diet. And of course we discuss how humans and other locally-dominant species can live together peacefully.
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Rae Wynn-Grant received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Columbia University. She is currently a Fellow with National Geographic Society working on carnivore conservation in partnership with the American Prairie Reserve. She maintains a Visiting Scientist position at the American Museum of Natural History, and adjunct faculty positions at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. She appears in National Geographic’s Born Wild: The Next Generation, premiering on April 22.
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- Talk on Humans and Conflicts with Bears
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And today, hopefully everyone is staying safe, staying healthy, still under lockdown, quarantine, social distancing and so forth.
0:00:12 SC: What we’re offering you today is a chance to be distracted a little bit by one of humanity’s favorite things to be distracted by: Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Mostly bears, to be perfectly honest. But what we’re going to be talking about are carnivorous animals, predators in the wild, and both how they hang out and how they hang out with human beings, how they interact with us, and how they should interact with us.
0:00:36 SC: So my guest is Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, who is a large carnivore ecologist. She studies, again, bears are her favorite thing, but also lions and other large predators and tries to figure out what their behavior is out there in the wild, how far they go when they go walking, their mating habits and stuff like that. As we will learn, as I learned, this is not a Gorillas in the Mist or Jane Goodall hanging out with the chimpanzees, kind of situation. Basically, you don’t want to hang out with the bears, you don’t want to live with the bears.
0:01:10 SC: Werner Herzog movies notwithstanding, you want to like touch the bears just enough to put a collar on them, trace them to see where they’re going, and then let them do their thing. But, it’s an important thing because we want to be able to live in harmony or as close as we can come to it with the wildlife around us, and some of that wildlife is dangerous, some of that wildlife is big and has claws and teeth and can hurt us, we want to protect that as well, so we need to understand it scientifically and that’s what we’re talking about today.
0:01:42 SC: The other thing to mention is that Rae is going to appear on a TV special. I’m releasing this podcast Monday, April 20th. Wednesday, April 22, is, of course, Earth Day and for Mindscape fans, it is also the birthday of Ariel and Caliban, my cats, but that is a coincidence that Ariel and Caliban were born on Earth Day. More importantly, National Geographic is releasing a special to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22. It’s a television event called Born Wild: The Next Generation, and Rae will appear in there with a whole bunch of other people. Rae in fact works as a fellow for the National Geographic Society as well as being a visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History.
0:02:24 SC: So if you want to see more, ’cause the pictures and the videos are always a hugely compelling part of this kind of story. The audio is great, the audio conversation we had was very entertaining, but if you really want to feel yourself there out in the wild with the bears and the lions, watch the TV special. And with that, let’s go.
[music]
0:03:00 SC: Rae Wynn-Grant, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
0:03:03 Rae Wynn-Grant: Thank you for having me, I’m happy to be here.
0:03:06 SC: It’s certainly a fascinating topic to talk about. So I think that the tentative title I came up for this podcast episode is Rae Wynn-Grant on Bears, Humans and Other Predators. And predators are sort of weirdly alluring, weirdly compelling, right? What is it that makes us so interested in giant animals that can easily kill us?
0:03:28 RW: Well, you know, I have a lot of different theories on this, but they are so good for storytelling, right? [chuckle] And stories are such an important part of human culture worldwide throughout history and the danger element. Again, like it just feeds in so well to stories and they’re just, they’re charismatic. I mean, not every carnivore out there in the world is the most charismatic animal, but everything from bears, lions, sharks, the really cool carnivorous plants, like they’re fascinating, they just are. [chuckle] So, I can’t blame people who are being captivated by them, they hooked me.
0:04:12 SC: It did strike me while I was thinking about this, that our most popular domestic pets, come from carnivores, from predators, dogs and cats. There are bunnies and hamsters, but there’s nothing quite like a good dangerous cat, to get people really interested.
0:04:30 RW: In fact, I was just watching an old episode of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he details how we domesticated wolves into dogs ages ago, and why, and how it’s such a mutually beneficial relationship. And it was just, I think that kind of story never gets old as well. To really understand that we took the vicious wild animals that could have killed us, and turned them into man’s best friend.
[chuckle]
0:04:58 SC: Well, certainly, you count as someone who is fascinated by these things. I want to get into the science of it, but let me just first ask about your research process. There’s lots of pictures of you out there in the field with bears, with lions, and so forth. So number one, what do you do? Number two, is it mostly you’re studying the animals for their own sakes or is it the interaction with human beings that you care about?
0:05:24 RW: Yeah, great questions, and I’m always happy to talk about myself. [chuckle] So I’m a carnivore ecologist. Ecology is a study of organisms and how they interact with their environment. Carnivores, to over-simplify, are meat-eating organisms. And I have a lot of great images out there of me handling some large carnivores because I do a lot of fieldwork. So there’s a lot of ways to do carnivore ecology. I like to tell people that wildlife ecologists can be in the field, in the lab, in the office. There’s all different ways to do this work, but I choose to kind of do a hybrid of fieldwork and field biology and then data analysis, which is bringing me back into the office space.
0:06:13 SC: Yeah.
0:06:16 RW: And my primary goals at this moment and since I started my career, is to look at patterns of movement and behavior. And so usually when I’m out there trapping, let’s use bears for an example, trapping bears and handling them. It’s so that I can attach a GPS collar to these animals, so I do not just go out into the wilderness and find bears and cuddle them for fun, although I can’t deny that it is extremely fun.
0:06:50 SC: It can be fun.
0:06:53 RW: But it is extremely purposeful, right? And very, very, very purposeful. And the only way to get a GPS unit on an animal is to capture that animal, and put that collar on. And so that’s where most of those images come from. So there’s a lot of photos out there of me with bears that are sleeping, they have been sedated so that I can do this work and that is probably the last time that I will come into physical contact with that animal for a year or two, until I find them again to take the collar off, and then I probably don’t interact with them again. So it’s really important for me to drive home to a lot of folks out there that the best ecology is non-invasive. It’s not a good idea to get animals used to humans and habituated to humans, so really like sedating them for a few moments, getting these devices on, doing health checks, check-ups, especially with juveniles or babies and then getting out of there. And getting that data, analyzing those patterns and learning about the animal from as far away as possible is the best method.
0:07:57 SC: I mean, there are other approaches, right? Everyone knows about Jane Goodall, and living with the chimpanzees where it’s almost more anthropology, where you’re really trying to study their behavior by interacting with them, so it’s very good. You’ve been very clear that you’re in there to sort of attach some data capturing device to them, and then let them live their natural life and that’s what you’re actually trying to study.
0:08:22 RW: That’s exactly right. And Jane Goodall is a huge, huge inspiration for me.
0:08:27 SC: Sure.
0:08:27 RW: So in a lot of ways, I bow down to her and her early work, but again, she wasn’t going to every chimpanzee population on the continent of Africa and living with them. She was taking one to use as a case study to understand their behavior, so that we don’t have to go into the other populations and do the same thing.
0:08:46 SC: Right.
0:08:46 RW: Right? So it’s kind of like they’re taking one for the team. Becoming habituated to humans so that we can understand their biology, their ecology, use that information to kind of make scientific conclusions for the whole species.
0:09:01 SC: Okay, so I really want to sort of put myself in as much of the shoes or boots of you when you’re out there tracking the bears as I can. I mean, do you know exactly where the bear is going to be? How do you sedate it? That is one question.
0:09:17 RW: Oh, yeah, I love talking about this stuff. So probably some of my worst and most boring stories from the field are about looking for bears, because the answer to your question is no, we do not know where they are going to be.
0:09:32 SC: I thought so, yeah.
0:09:33 RW: If we use black bears as an example. I think it’s hilarious because when I tell people that I study black bears, almost everybody I tell has a black bear story to tell me. They went camping, they saw a bear, they grew up in Vermont and bears used to come into their backyards, whatever it is, so many folks have a bear story. I have actually struggled to find bears when I need to find them. I don’t know if it’s like bad luck, if I have a curse, whatever it is, in my entire life I have never seen a bear on accident, ever, ever.
0:10:07 SC: Oh, my goodness, even I have done that.
0:10:08 RW: Ever, never. I mean, I would love it. So when I’m looking for these extremely wild, back country animals, a lot of the time, I am hiking, camping in the back country for sometimes weeks on end, setting traps. And these are baited traps.
0:10:31 SC: Okay.
0:10:31 RW: To lure bears to the trap so that they will be captured, I can tranquillize them, put the collar on and then release them. So to be clear, when we’re talking about baiting a trap, I’m baiting it with things like a can of tuna fish, something that is like yummy-smelling, but also appropriate. Bears ear a lot of fish, so it is very natural for them. And then these traps are typically what we call barrel traps or culvert traps, which are very large, so they’re big enough to hold a couple of bears in them. It’s almost like a big cage.
0:11:07 SC: Oh, okay.
0:11:07 RW: Where the bear walks into the trap, the food, the baited food is at the back. Once it uses its paw to take the food, a door closes on the opposite side. And I check that trap twice a day to make sure a bear isn’t in there for too long. It is contained in there so it gives me an easy shot, to kinda stick it with a jab stick with the sedative.
0:11:31 SC: Okay, so it’s not like a gun from distance. You have to get close enough to poke the bear, literally.
0:11:38 RW: Yes, quite literally. And not to get it twisted, we do have tranquillizer guns. Those are typically used when a bear is in a tree. And I would say like when a bear is causing a problem.
0:11:52 SC: Sure.
0:11:52 RW: Like if they were having a human-bear conflict issue, when a bear is in somebody’s backyard going through their trash and then the authorities show up and bear goes up the tree, that’s when we might have to shoot it with a tranquillizer just so that we can get it back down and take it and release it back into the forest. But when it comes to me trapping bears for the purposes of putting a collar on them, it’s really just like a syringe on the edge of a long stick, sometimes I can whittle that stick together myself. And you just poke the bear in the shoulder. It is probably about the same as getting a flu shot and less, possibly less painful. In about five or 10 minutes, they fall asleep. They’re asleep for about an hour.
0:12:38 RW: A way to measure them, take their temperature. I have to use rectal thermometers. I always try to throw that in there because people think it’s amusing. Check the bear for parasites, so for ectoparasites.
0:12:53 SC: But you also threw in there that you weigh them. That sounds like an extraordinary bit of effort there.
0:12:58 RW: Yeah, I’m only able to weigh these bears if I’m working with a team. So certainly, sometimes, when I’m doing this fieldwork, I’m alone or maybe with one other assistant, but if I’m ever lucky enough to have a team with me, which is about half of the time, we weigh the bear. So when it is sedated and out cold, we have a tarp. We all lift the many hundreds of pound bears on to the tarp and we’ll have a big stick, so we’ll find some type of big log or something nearby, rope the tarp around the log. We have a scale that we bring with us. It is all very makeshift, but we weigh the bear in terms of kilograms right there in the wilderness.
0:13:45 SC: So when the bear is in the trap, is it sad? Is it angry? Are these bears used to this kind of nonsense? Or is it an angry bear that you have to deal with?
0:14:00 RW: Yeah, they’re certainly not used to it. So it’s very unnatural. One of the things that I love about bears is that they don’t have any natural predators.
0:14:07 SC: Right.
0:14:08 RW: In their environment. So they’re top of the food chain. They’re apex predators themselves. So I’ve found that they are not super afraid, necessarily, of being in a trap. Bears don’t have a lot of fear.
0:14:22 SC: I see.
0:14:24 RW: But they will get aggravated ’cause they don’t want to be in there, especially once the food is gone, they want to keep on moving. So it’s really important just to be humane, to make sure that the bear doesn’t have too much of a stress response, to make sure that we are not keeping them in there for more than a couple of hours. I will also say, big, large carnivores do a lot of resting. So it is not uncommon to have a bear go into a trap, get the food, realize they can’t get out and have it just lay down for a bit and just take a rest in the shade.
0:15:01 SC: Yeah, that part has been preserved in the domesticated cat, I can assure you. A lot of that gets done.
0:15:06 RW: Yeah, absolutely, it’s a perfect example.
0:15:08 SC: And so then, you put the collar on and it’s a GPS system? Is that it? Or is there a more complicated apparatus involved?
0:15:16 RW: No, it’s a GPS collar. So the same GPS that we might have in our smartphones. It’s a small device that hangs off of the collar, it is very light. Many of them are large in size, but that does not equate to a heavy weight.
0:15:31 SC: Yeah, okay.
0:15:32 RW: So it’s just this lightweight collar that goes on the bear, and that you guessed, sends a signal to a satellite in outer space, and the satellite sends a signal to my computer that lets me know the longitude and latitude of the bear every couple of hours. And so, that data gets stored in a database and updated every few hours, and I have way more data than I would ever need of where this bear is going. And looking over the course of a year, or best case scenario over two years, we’re able to really establish the home range of the animal and understand where it goes and where it spends its time.
0:16:12 SC: So you’re not tempted to put a little camera on there, a little webcam on the collar?
0:16:18 RW: I wish we could get that far, I wish we had that type of opportunities, but we really don’t. We do a lot of trail cameras, I will say. So now that I am associated with National Geographic, I’ve been introduced to all of these cool photographers who often accompany biologists into the field, and they set these great camera traps, and they really position them. It’s amazing the type of images that they get. So maybe there’s a carcass that they expect a wolf or a bear or a mountain lion to come back to at some point, and they’ll position this camera trap right there at the carcass and get these amazing images. I use camera traps absolutely all the time, but when I’m using them, it’s just to keep an eye on my bear trap. And that is because from time to time, I will set a trap and actually have non-bear animals go in, steal the food, and go back out without being trapped.
0:17:14 SC: Sure, there’s yummy tuna fish in there.
0:17:15 RW: So I put camera traps out just to see what’s going on and why I keep striking out. [chuckle]
0:17:20 SC: And these bears are… This is North America you’re mostly doing this?
0:17:24 RW: Yup, I do do work in North America. There’s eight different bear species around the world over four continents. I study North American bears at the moment, so black bears and brown bears. And I’m hoping, some time soon, some polar bears.
0:17:38 SC: Okay.
0:17:39 RW: But of course, brown bears are also in parts of Europe and Asia and so, a lot of the conclusions and the ecological information that we’re getting from them is useful in other parts of the world.
0:17:53 SC: And so, what is it that we’re actually learning from these GPS studies? Clearly their range, but is it more behavioral, is it more ecological?
0:18:02 RW: Yeah, it’s both, it’s both. So I like to do a lot of comparisons and compare the movement of bears that live in what we’ll call the back country, so areas very, very far from human presence, and compare that to the movement of bears that live in and around areas of high human activity. And we’re finding some things that might seem obvious to people that back country bears will have a much larger home range, so a lot of people will call that territory size. Bears are cool, they’re solitary animals. So you’re not going to find a mama bear and a papa bear hanging out together, despite what children’s stories might tell us. [chuckle] They’re by themselves. And so, they are also territorial. And so, they like to establish their own territories. So we’ll see really, really big home ranges for bears that have that kind of space.
0:19:00 RW: But for lack of a better word, urban bears. I don’t want people to take that term too far because they’re not in the cities. But for bears that kind of live on the edge of the human-wild land interface, we’re finding much more condensed home ranges, much more overlap, especially in areas where there are an abundance of food and resources. I also love using GPS collars to look at where female bears den in the winter. One of the coolest things about North American bears I think is that they hibernate, and that is awesome. And figuring out where they choose to make their den is really interesting. There are some patterns that we see there. Sometimes we see female bears choosing to den closer to areas of human activity and male bears denning further from human activity. It raises a lot of questions. Are females doing that because the males have picked the best habitat and they have to go for a second best habitat or is there something about being near to people that is actually a better place for females to den especially when they’re giving birth to cubs? A lot of unanswered questions there, but to me it’s fascinating.
0:20:07 SC: I have plenty of colleagues at Caltech who live in Pasadena or Altadena and get bears showing up to their swimming pools in their backyards all the time. So we’re at the bear-human interface right around here, I can believe it.
0:20:18 RW: Of course there are.
0:20:20 SC: And so it’s interesting, so when the bears hibernate they do it solo, they’re not with a pal.
0:20:29 RW: That’s right, yes. So again, I like to often go back to children’s stories because they’re so sweet, they always have these very pleasant bear families and bear communities all hanging out and that is just so not realistic.
0:20:46 SC: Yeah.
0:20:46 RW: Bears are by themselves. So one bear in a large part of the forest. Again, they are, they are not close together even when hibernating in dens. So the only time you’re going to have more than one bear in a den is if you have a female who has given birth and has cubs with her.
0:21:09 SC: Okay.
0:21:11 RW: Something that I think is awesome, that I think everyone should think is awesome is that females begin hibernation while pregnant and actually give birth in the den. So in the ecology community we basically estimate that every bear in North America that’s ever been born was born in January. That is just around the time, we all give them a January 1st-January 15th birth date estimate. That’s around the time that the females give birth in the den. And then they give birth to these teeny tiny little… Little bears, I mean, black bear cubs at birth can be about a pound.
0:21:48 SC: Oh, my goodness.
0:21:49 RW: And polar bear cubs at birth could be about a pound-and-a-half. They’re really, really small and they’re kind of hairless and blind and they just, a couple of them come out, they nurse on their mother for three, four or five months until it’s safe to come out of the den and by that time they’re big and they’re strong and they’re able to take on the world.
0:22:08 SC: How big is a litter?
0:22:10 RW: So, a litter is typically two to three for black bears, two to three for brown bears as well, but they can be big. We usually don’t see four or more, but depending on the region two or three is typical.
0:22:24 SC: It’s a little interesting to me that they don’t hang out in families because since human beings do there’s this inevitable temptation to say things like, well, of course mothers and fathers stick with their children because they want to protect their genetic line and preserve it and so forth. But then every such generalization has a million counter examples in the animal kingdom. Why don’t male papa bears want to protect their kids? Is there an explanation for that kind of thing?
0:22:53 RW: You know, we don’t necessarily have an explanation for it, but it is in line with solitary wildlife species. So the social animals, I know if we stick with carnivores, the social carnivores do that. So wolves will create a pack and they will, the wolf dad will take his wolf daughter off and teach her how to hunt and always protect her and they’re a very strong family unit. We see that with lion prides. So a male lion at the top of its harem will have all these different females but will make sure that no one’s really going anywhere. But with bears, with mountain lions, with other solitary predators, we’re really just seeing very, very different behavior. They’re kind of all for one, one-for-all. A male bear will mate with a female and probably never see her again and never see his offspring.
0:23:46 SC: But is there some theoretical understanding of what makes a species social or not in that sense?
0:23:52 RW: Not necessarily, that I’m aware of, at least. It’s really kind of this pack animal mentality. And I think it also has a lot to do with how they eat, how they eat and how they feed. So if you look at bears, they’re so fortunate that they, although they’re carnivores, they are highly omnivorous, right? Their diet, they have a lot of dietary plasticity is how we say it in ecology, so they do great eating fish, taking down deer. In parts of the country where I study bears we see them eating wild horses, the farms of wild horses. A lot of highly carnivorous predatory behavior. But they also do just as well eating fruit and eating root vegetables and nuts and seeds and berries and all of that kind of thing.
0:24:41 RW: And because of that they’re kind of less dependent on each other or on a group to find food resources and survive. Mountain lions are obligate carnivores, they do a lot of hunting, they have to kind of cache their prey away once they make a kill, but they seem to do pretty well being independent. I would love to dig into more of the theory of why some are and some aren’t, but at this point, bears just do their own thing. It’s one of the things I love about them because I love my alone time. I consider myself a solitary predator.
0:25:17 SC: Bears are introverts.
[laughter]
0:25:20 RW: Yeah. Like I’m an introvert in a lot of ways, I just really like having my own space and so I can relate to them a lot.
0:25:28 SC: Well, I mean, this is a… It raises up a whole another set of questions that I was interested in asking you about: Why are there carnivores at all? Predators at all? In the sense that a carnivore, something that eats other animals, relies on the whole huge ecosystem more or less operating pretty well, right? ‘Cause those animals have to eat plants and those plants have to exist. Whereas if you just eat the plants directly, maybe things are a little bit more flexible for you. Is it just a matter of efficiency? I know there’s, of course, far fewer predators, carnivores, than there are herbivores, but they are there in just about every ecosystem, right?
0:26:09 RW: Pretty much, yeah. And we see a lot of issues when carnivores are removed from different ecosystems, so they are important. And I love that you were able to acknowledge that we don’t need as many carnivores in a space as we do herbivores and composters and all of the others, but they play a big role. I love using bears as an example, again. They are really incredible seed dispersers. So we depend on bats, we depend on other types of animals, herbivores, for our seed dispersing, but bears do a great job of that. But they also distribute vital nutrients that they get from eating animals. So if we take those brown bears up in Alaska that just go crazy eating salmon during the salmon run, when they poop all throughout the forest, they’re distributing vital nitrogen all throughout the forest, that comes from eating those fish and digesting those bones, that allows the forest to regenerate and keep growing. So the plant community is, in a lot of ways, dependent on carnivores eating meat and getting those types of nutrients, especially nitrogen, and distributing it pretty far and wide.
0:27:23 SC: So that makes sense in terms of the benefit that they get. What is the benefit to the carnivore of being a carnivore?
[chuckle]
0:27:32 RW: The benefit to the carnivore of being a carnivore? Well, what I think is cool, and again I am not any type of nutritionist, but protein goes a long way, right? So we know that herbivores, for example, really have to spend so much time grazing, so much time eating. Many of them don’t hibernate, they have to make sure that they’re able to access resources all year round, and it’s kind of a constant behavior, right? Like they’re very, very driven by being able to eat however many tonnes of vegetation per day that they need to survive. Whereas carnivores, if they get a good high-protein meal, they don’t have to do that again for maybe a day or two days, so they actually are able to spend more time mating, spend more time finding new territories, spend more time pooping and dispersing nutrients throughout the forest. It’s really, really great for them to be able to take that protein, let it sate their appetite and then do all the other things that animals need to do.
0:28:37 SC: And sleeping. Yeah, there’s a lot of sleeping that gets done. [chuckle]
0:28:39 RW: And so much sleeping. See, can’t you see why I love them so much? It’s like eating…
0:28:44 SC: Oh, yeah.
0:28:44 SC: Sleeping, resting, exploring… [laughter]
0:28:46 SC: They’ve got it figured out.
0:28:47 RW: They’ve just got it made.
0:28:48 SC: That’s right. And how do carnivores get along with each other? I read somewhere, when thinking about this episode, that carnivores don’t eat other carnivores, but do they compete with other carnivores generally? Different species of carnivores?
0:29:04 RW: So you bring up a question… [chuckle] You bring up a question that has been answered in some ways, but really depends on region, and the way that different environments may change over time or might be changing in response to human activity. So for the most part, yeah, they’re not eating each other, right. So we don’t typically find carnivores eating each other. If I were to just oversimplify, it’s because they don’t want to expend too much energy.
0:29:38 SC: Yeah.
0:29:39 RW: If a mountain lion wanted to eat a bear, it would have to fight so, so hard, and nobody has time for that. They’re a little bit lazy. And so, it’s way easier to find a nest of eggs, to find a sick or a very young or weak herbivore to take down than to pick a fight with another big strong creature. So that’s pretty much why they don’t do it. But it’s not completely unheard for a very, very hungry carnivore to come across a carcass of another one and maybe take a few bites. I mean, that’s not totally unheard of, because survival’s also important. And remind me of the other part of your question before I get too far.
0:30:21 SC: Oh, sorry, I’ve already forgotten it, but…
[laughter]
0:30:24 SC: But that’s okay.
0:30:24 RW: Well, I had an answer for it, so I’m going to get a little frustrated. But…
0:30:28 SC: No, I’m just wondering…
0:30:29 RW: Yeah, they don’t…
0:30:30 SC: You know, why…
0:30:30 RW: They don’t…
0:30:31 SC: Why there are… Do carnivores sort of carve out domains of influence? Do they like say, “Okay, you can get this kind of species”? Like if there are wolves and bears in the same ecosystem, if they don’t attack each other, do they at least compete for similar resources? Or is there an unspoken agreement between them?
0:30:54 RW: Right, and so that’s where we find a lot of complementarity in these ecosystems. So I think this is so beautiful, how nature often just kind of works together. It’s like a puzzle, right, and everyone kind of has their own fit in the puzzle, for the most part. Again, things are going to be widely different if there is a change in the availability of resources for one carnivore or one herbivore, then things will really get messed up and pretty skewed, and that’s where we see some really interesting things happening in ecology. I’ll give you an example from my study area in the Western Great Basin, so kind of the area where Nevada meets California and the Sierras. Where we have seen an increase in the black bear population over the last 20, 30 years. A very rapid increase in the black bear population and a much slower increase in the mountain lion population.
0:31:55 RW: So the mountain lion population has remained pretty much stable, increasing but not as, not as fast of a rate as black bears. And mountain lions, typically they are hunting deer, they are hunting elk, they’re getting all of those herbivores. And we’ve seen as we’ve gotten more and more black bears that they’ve actually started to push mountain lions off of their kills. So when a mountain kills something and kind of stashes it away in a tree, we’ve seen a black bear, one at a time, kind of come in and steal that carcass from the mountain lion.
0:32:32 SC: Aha. [chuckle]
0:32:32 RW: Whereas typically they wouldn’t do that. So we’re actually seeing when we have collared bear and a collared mountain lion, if we look at our map, we’re actually seeing them interacting in space and time, actually kind of having a face off over these kills. Whereas normally bears would just kind of take their fish, take their eggs, eat all the juniper berries that are around, dig up all their root vegetables. And so this is atypical behavior from what we understand about predator-to-predator ecology and behavior. And it’s really, really fascinating. So a lot of us are questioning, “Is it because the climate is changing? Are there fewer vegetation options for bears? Are there more people in this part of Nevada and California, so that it’s actually restricting bears from going to places where they would normally get their food?”
0:33:25 RW: Really, what is it about what’s changing in the environment and creating this kind of non-perfect… I talked about the perfect puzzle.
0:33:35 SC: Yeah.
0:33:35 RW: That carnivals make and we’re seeing some disruption to that.
0:33:39 SC: Is there some relationship between being a carnivore and intelligence in a species? Do you need to be a little bit quicker on the ball to survive in this kind of environment?
0:33:50 RW: I don’t want to make too many generalizations, because if we were to talk about what we consider some of the most intelligent animals on the planet I think the top few would be herbivores, we could think of a lot of big whale species that are non-carnivorous; we could think about elephants, they are herbivores; we can think about mountain gorillas, they might eat some insects, but they’re primarily herbivorous. But at the same time that predatory nature, and the ability to kind of understand opportunity… Like fear versus opportunity, risk versus reward, is really unique to apex predators like carnivores. And so there’s I would argue a different kind of intelligence, that is inherent in them.
0:34:43 SC: And maybe sharks are an example of a successful predator that might not be that smart.
0:34:49 RW: There you go! Yeah, there you go. I always have trouble talking about an animal not being smart, because I feel like it’s kinda disrespectful, you know, we’re animals too. And yeah, we’re brilliant, but exactly. Sharks are fairly impulse-driven, and make a lot of mistakes. So that would be a good example.
0:35:09 SC: But you alluded to the idea that the populations are growing in the United States for black bears, for mountain lions, is that because we’re getting better at conservation?
0:35:22 RW: Yeah, I love… As an ecologist, as a conservation scientist, I love to talk about conservation success stories, because we’re often plagued with what’s not working.
0:35:33 SC: Yeah.
0:35:34 RW: We can talk about carnivores on the brink of extinction around the world all day long. Look at tigers, look at lions, look at sharks, like we were saying. But in the United States, there’s been a lot of conservation attention to carnivores, to wolves, as controversial as they can be; wolves, grizzly bears, black bears, polar bears, mountain lions. We’ve done a really good job of giving them attention, putting some policies and legislation in order to protect their habitats, and for many of these species it has worked. If you went back 50-60 years there were very few black bears in a lot of spaces and they’ve been restored to a lot of ecosystems.
0:36:17 RW: In 2016, at the end of the Obama administration, he was able to take the Florida… I’m sorry, the Louisiana black bear off of the Endangered Species List. And that leaves no subspecies of black bears on the endangered species list anymore, which is tremendous. Think of another carnivore, think of the bald eagle. Back in the ’90s, we were plagued with this information about how critically endangered bald eagles were, their egg shells were too thin, and they weren’t able to reproduce successfully. And now bald eagles are soaring all over the place. You can go to parts of New York City and possibly spot an eagle. It’s really, really incredible, and they’ve had a lot of success.
0:37:00 SC: What is the actual policy that is most helpful here, is it just don’t kill them or stay out of their territory or something else?
0:37:08 RW: It depends. [chuckle] Typical science response. It depends on the region, it depends on the dynamics of the area, it depends on the species. Definitely the Endangered Species Act and the Endangered Species List has been tremendously important. That’s a huge piece of legislation that often, and I’m over-simplifying, but it’ll often say, “Okay, anywhere where this species is found is protected area.” It also means you can’t hunt the species for the most part, right. If it’s on the Endangered Species List, it can’t be hunted, and that is a huge way, this probably sounds really obvious, but it’s a really great way to protect species.
0:37:50 RW: Many of these species on the list have become critically endangered because of over-hunting. But also habitat destruction. So if there’s a forest that we want to turn into a ski resort, but there’s some type of endangered species that lives in that area, we’re not going to be able to do as much development or sometimes any development in those areas. But also there’s a lot of, kind of trade-offs for people and the economy that need to happen. If I take the Louisiana black bear as an example, down south the government actually started paying agricultural workers, so farm owners, to not farm on their land and to allow the forest to regenerate in those areas.
0:38:37 SC: Okay.
0:38:37 RW: For as long as the Louisiana black bear was listed, and it works. So again, the people weren’t losing money, losing their livelihoods, they were actually getting paid as if they were farming actively. They were also just letting, they weren’t doing active restoration of the forest but they were just letting their land do whatever it does naturally, leaving bears alone, not hunting them and they were able to rebound.
0:39:04 SC: I did a wonderful podcast a while ago now, with Joe Walston who is a conservationist, and he actually had a weirdly optimistic take that as human beings move into more and more dense urban environments, it will become easier and easier to actually preserve large amounts of natural habitats for wildlife and for different kind of species. So he puts it in the language of if we get past the bottleneck where we’re killing off species too quickly, we can imagine a future equilibrium where we live in harmony with them. Do you think that’s a realistic kind of prospect?
0:39:40 RW: I absolutely do, and I love talking about it in a kind of different way, because I fell into conservation biology and wildlife ecology as an urban-dwelling person. I’ve always lived in a big city, I was born in a big city. I never recreated in nature for fun until it became part of my career, and so often people will ask me like, “Oh, gosh, how can you live in New York City, how can you live in Washington, DC?” And I’m so happy to be able to give the response like, “Well, it’s better for the environment, in a lot of ways.” So urbanization has been… There’s been some metrics developed to suggest that the more urbanized we become as a human society around the globe, the more wild area is able to flourish.
0:40:29 RW: And so it’s a great idea, there’s… What I find problematic is, the way many conservationists, and I’m not mentioning your guest on the show, but the way a lot of conservationists kind of will gloss over the social implications for it, right? And a lot of the kind of ethics about people who may choose to live rurally or especially, particularly tribal lifestyles and not want to be urban, so we don’t want to necessarily suggest people like that are a problem or a part of the problem.
0:41:06 SC: Sure.
0:41:08 RW: But if people opt into living an urban lifestyle, if an urban lifestyle is rewarding for them, there’s enough job opportunity, like, we can kind of solve poverty in cities, it offers so much opportunity for conservation to work, and fairly quickly, just kind of getting off the land pretty quickly shows that nature is able to respond really, really well. And it could be what saves the planet.
0:41:45 SC: Have you seen the pictures of the coyote walking down the streets of Chicago that everyone is now down in lockdown, the wildlife moves in pretty quickly, yeah.
0:41:54 RW: Yeah, yeah. The bears in Yosemite, right? That’s a protected area in itself. Yosemite, especially this time of year, is used to having a lot of visitors and bears are now coming out of hibernation in parts of the mountains to no visitors, so mother bears are able to kind of just be free with their cubs and just use all different parts of the forest that they weren’t able to before. All the animals are so happy right now. Maybe not the tiger in the Bronx Zoo who got Coronavirus but all the other ones.
0:42:25 SC: One of the things that Joe Walston did mention is that historically almost all of the great conservationists and environmentalists came from cities, those are the ones who sort of feel the danger of the landscape around them disappearing more intently, I guess, something like that.
0:42:43 RW: That’s so interesting. I did not know that. And that makes me feel way better about my self.
0:42:46 SC: Yeah, yeah. Not just you. Not just you, Rae. But there’s this, a big set of questions about how, regardless of whether we’re in cities or in the country, how human beings should interact with these great animals, right? With whether it’s lions or bears or whatever. In your estimation, should we sort of try to rope them off, keep them apart and leave them alone, or will there always be these kind of overlap zones, where there’s the occasional black bear taking a dip in someone’s pool in their backyard?
0:43:20 RW: Yeah, this is a complex question and I have strong opinions.
0:43:24 SC: Please.
0:43:25 RW: About it and I really… I guess I will start by saying that it’s so important to me that humans acknowledge where we are and what land we’re on, right? So even if we are preaching that we should move towards more urbanization, understanding that, like right now, I’m in Washington, DC. Like understanding that before this was a big city, this was a place with bears and lions and wolves and a whole wildlife community. So when we do see a lot of these animals kind of showing back up as the population sizes increase, as we see them like in the ex-urban spaces and the sub-urban spaces on the edges of towns and cities, to really understand that that is naturally and historically where they were meant to be.
0:44:15 RW: The other thing I’ll say is that as long as we are responsible, I think humans have a huge responsibility towards promoting human-wildlife co-existence. Bears are a great example to use when we talk about this, because humans attract bears to where we are. If we weren’t barbecuing on our backyards, if we weren’t throwing out trash, if we weren’t leaving our dog food in the dish on the porch, bears that can smell, sense from over a mile away wouldn’t necessarily be interested in coming on to the edge of town to dig in your trash.
0:44:56 RW: So the more responsible people can be at eliminating attractants to wildlife, again, it could be bears, but it could also be raccoons, it could be the coyotes, it could be the deer. If you plant a yummy garden, you can’t necessarily be super upset that some herbivore wants to come and eat it, right. You are creating human food resources in a place that is easily accessible to an animal. The more responsible we can be, the less selfish we can be, I think, the easier we’ll find co-existence. And I think the easier we’ll find living with increased population sizes of wild animals. I often give talks about human-bear coexistence in the places where I do my research, and I’ll have people come up to me afterwards and say, “Oh, I have a bear-proof garbage can, I make sure to be really responsible in this way, in this way, but I still have bears in my backyard.”
0:45:57 RW: And I’ll say things like, “Well, do you have a bird feeder? Do you have a fountain, like a little gurgling water fountain in your backyard?” Things like that are still resources that bears need, and especially as we’re adding in the complexity of climate change, for example, where that’s skewing when resources are available, and the predictive nature of that. These animals are going to go for the easiest option, especially in places that are their ancestral homes.
0:46:35 SC: Yeah, and…
0:46:35 RW: The other thing I’ll say is that, it’s everybody’s goal, myself included, to have a vacation home somewhere, so as urban as we want to be, when we are building our vacation homes and our vacation spaces in these beautiful areas with gorgeous mountains and beautiful forest, we’re encroaching on wildlife habitat. And so that has to come with the acknowledgement that bears might be there too.
0:47:03 SC: Well, and also the acknowledgement that they are legitimately dangerous, right? If we want them to survive and flourish, etcetera, and if we are going to have a world where there are overlapping regions, then do we need to… Do at least the people who frequent those overlapping regions need to be better educated in how to get along on a day-to-day basis, or literally what you do when you stumble across one while hiking?
0:47:27 RW: Yeah, absolutely. Safety is super, super important. And again, it speaks to coexistence. I love, I just, I can’t say enough good things about bears.
[laughter]
0:47:37 RW: I love using them as an example, again, when we talk about safety, because they’re actually a really non-aggressive species, especially if you talk about black bears, right?
0:47:50 SC: Okay.
0:47:50 RW: Like black bears don’t have a whole bunch of fear, but they also don’t want any problems. A lot of carnivores, like we were saying before, they don’t want to fight, they are not interested in expending their energy on fighting. They’d much rather rest, relax, get a meal, hang out.
0:48:09 SC: Right.
0:48:09 RW: And so it really takes a lot of triggers for a black bear, for a brown bear, for a mountain lion, for a wolf to attack you. You really have to be provoking them. So just making sure that you can make your presence known, if you come into contact with a bear, you back off, you look away, so you don’t make eye contact with the animal, ’cause that can be seen as aggressive.
0:48:34 SC: Okay.
0:48:35 RW: You look at its feet, you look above its head so you’re not making that eye contact. You slowly back off. If you are hiking, I always recommend bear spray. Bear spray is just a great deterrent, because it’s pepper spray, essentially. And it is extremely irritating to the eyes. [chuckle] Your eyes included. And so it is just a great way to kind of create a barrier between you and the animal. So the animal says, “Okay, I don’t want any kinds of problems here.” And you’re able to just calmly make your escape.
0:49:11 SC: I always see these rules or instructions for what you see when you encounter bears and they seem completely different if it’s a brown bear, or a black bear, or a grizzly bear, and there’s zero chance I’m going to remember what to do [chuckle] depending on what kind of bear it is. So the advice you just gave is pretty universal, you think?
0:49:28 RW: It’s pretty universal. And again, what you’re saying is that there is really different advice for whether you are encountering a bear, or whether you are being attacked by a bear. If you’re being attacked by a bear, there are different sets of advice, for what to do. If it’s a black bar, you’re encouraged to fight it off. If it is a grizzly bear, you’re encouraged to curl yourself into a little ball and play dead until it is done messing with you. If it’s a polar bear, I’m sorry, you might not make it.
[laughter]
0:50:03 RW: But again, the…
0:50:05 SC: That’s important advice.
0:50:05 RW: The advice for, if you were on a hike and you see 30 feet ahead of you is a bear, that is when you stop in your tracks, make yourself look either really big or really small, back away, don’t make eye contact, and just slowly leave, make sure that you position yourself as not a threat to the animal, not interested in the animal.
0:50:25 SC: Okay, okay, very good, that’s good to know. I did have a couple of extra little science questions just about what we’ve learned from your studies of the bears.
0:50:26 RW: Sure.
0:50:26 SC: We can basically study them in space and in time. It seems to me that they’re pretty sparsely distributed, right? There’s not like, you said, big bear cities. Is there some knowledge of how they find each other? Dating is hard enough in the big city for human beings with all those sort of apps, like, is there a procedure by which bears sort of do socialize on those rare occasions?
0:51:00 RW: Yeah, so in terms of mating, they smell each other. So female bears make sure to mark their scent, male bears make sure to follow that scent. And so, they actually just, they have such an incredible sense of smell that they smell each other from really, really far away, meet up at the right times and then say goodbye forever. [chuckle]
0:51:20 SC: Okay.
0:51:21 RW: And the only times that we might see bears congregate in the same area is if there is some common resource that they don’t need to fight over. So again, if you just think of those classic videos you might see on YouTube or on National Geographic of bears at a river, with spawning salmon and you’ll see a number of bears all together, they’re not fighting over one salmon. There’s so many to go around that they will congregate at the same time each day, get their salmon and then again, be in very separate places for the rest of the day.
0:51:57 SC: That’s right, and we are here, among other things, to mention that there is a National Geographic special coming out this week as the same week that this podcast is going to be released, called Born Wild: The Next Generation and you’ll be in it and people can see exactly those images that you say of the bears hunting and hanging out and so forth.
0:52:18 RW: Yeah, and the great thing about this show that’s coming out and I can’t wait to see what my colleagues were up to, the other explorers all over the world who are going to be featured in this show, is that as much as I work with sedated bears [chuckle] when I have my hands on them, we are actually, we filmed this in the winter when we were doing a bear den survey. So I’m actually working with newborn cubs and so, we never give any kind of drugs to cubs when they’re that little. So we’re actually seeing awake bears, active, adorable, cutie pie, little baby animals, who have never seen the light of day before, we take them out of their den for 10 minutes, just enough time for us to weigh them, measure them, sex them and check their overall health before we put them back with mom. So it’s an amazing glimpse into the secret life of bears, but also the secret life of bear biologists and I can’t wait for people to see it. [chuckle]
0:53:15 SC: Are the bears so anti-social that it’s not even worth sort of studying their social networks? Like do bears have friends and enemies and nemeses and frenemies and stuff like that or do they just just keep away from the other bears?
0:53:28 RW: Yeah, they’re really, I mean, they are anti-social, and people hate it when I say that, I think it brings a lot of disappointment, again, because we’re kind of, we, as humans, are socialized to believe that they are just like friendly and sweet and always out together and they’re the protagonists of all of our stories. But really, they don’t, if they pass by a fox in the forest, they’re not stopping to say hi. [chuckle] They’re… They just keep it moving.
0:53:55 SC: But you have also, this is a good segue ’cause you’ve also done research in Africa on big cats, lions, in particular, or…
0:54:01 RW: Yes, yeah, African lions.
0:54:03 SC: And their sociability strategies are completely different, which I still am waiting for the grand unified theory of this but meanwhile, let’s collect all the data and figure out in what way they are different in their sociability.
0:54:18 RW: Yeah, they are so, so different. The studies that I always did were very similar to how I was studying bears, so I was looking less at their behavior and more at their movement patterns. So in my studies of African lions, I was, again, capturing them, putting a GPS collar on one or two members of the pride and really looking at how they’re using the landscape and what landscapes they’re using. So if you think of a huge African savanna, a lot of us might want to think that lions are using every square inch of that savanna, but it’s not true, there’s actually parts of the savanna that they completely avoid, parts that they use all the time, and parts that they just pass through. So my work has always been to just understand their movement, which helps us understand their ecology and especially how we can protect the most important areas for those lions and if any kind of landscape development is needed for the human economy, where we can best fit that in in order to still protect lion habitat.
0:55:18 SC: Yeah, I understand why for conservation and ecology purposes you want to know where they spend their time, but as the physicist, I want to know why they spend their time in certain places. I’m sure I’m asking a lot of questions to which the answer is just not known, but do we understand why lions enjoy hanging out in certain regions and just pass right by others or avoid them entirely?
0:55:39 RW: Yeah, we have baseline understandings, and again, every region is different. So, there is, I actually have a colleague who is right now hypothesizing that there’s something about the soil types of different parts of the savanna versus other parts that might actually be driving some of this habitat selection preference. And it’s a big question, but that’s a cool thing about science and a cool thing about ecologists is that one question leads us to another to another. If I were to be super general, of course, it’s all about food resources and water resources. The dry parts of the savanna where there’s no fresh water, they’re going to avoid those areas, ’cause there’s no herbivores going to the watering holes, and so they have to go farther to look for food, but it can be more complex and it can also be seasonal, right? So in certain seasons lions are over here, in certain seasons, lions seem to be more all over the place, it really depends, and we see that lion movement and behavior might be different in parts of South Africa versus parts of East Africa versus parts of Central Africa.
0:56:44 RW: So that’s what I love about ecology is that we have some kind of basic baseline information that we can generalize to an entire species, but if you take one population, one pride, you can actually really dig in and see some differences that then make you question everything.
0:57:00 SC: Well, I keep coming back to this social network question, because you just mentioned differences, and even though there are, you studied lions, but there’s other kinds of big cats and as far as my meagre understanding goes, their social networks are just entirely different, right? There are also very anti-social cats as well as very social ones.
0:57:00 RW: Oh, yes, absolutely. So if we, if we hop to a different continent, and we can look at tigers that are not in these big prides, we could hop to North America and look at mountain lions, which are solitary, or we can even stay in Africa where we’re talking about African lions and look at leopards which are on their own, unless we’re talking about a female. So I think it’s just truly, truly fascinating and I have never studied big cats other than lions, so I am not as much of an expert but it is so fascinating to me how these animal species that could have so much in common and in a lot of ways do actually behave so so differently from each other.
0:58:07 SC: Yeah, there’s a lot of contingency and randomness in the evolutionary history that means that some things are selected for ’cause they work or don’t, but a lot of things just might be accidents, there might not be a reason why, right?
0:58:21 RW: Yeah, that’s one of the things that I love so much about learning about evolution and how it relates to ecology is that so much is random, right? When I was a student, I actually studied what we call the neutral theory of evolution, which is just basically questioning well, what if all of this is just happening at complete random? And it’s a great way to question some of the patterns or things that we think are patterns, that we see in a nature community, like why is this species social and this species isn’t? We think we can identify some reasons, but it could have just arisen randomly and it just works for now and we’ll see how it continues in the future. But again, to me, that is a way to emphasize why we need conservation because we want to answer some of these questions in the future, we can’t do it if we don’t have these animals.
0:59:14 SC: Is there… So just a last question, what do you see as your hope for future end goal, your equilibrium? Like how should we imagine living in… Harmony may be too much, but at least in a mutually beneficial equilibrium with the big predators that we’re talking about today?
0:59:37 RW: Yeah, when I think about what I see as the future of conservation, I often surprise people because I bring in a lot of human social issues, so I truly think that conservation cannot be successful, wildlife conservation cannot be successful unless we eliminate poverty from human societies. So so much of what we see as a threat to the conservation, especially at local and regional scales, is due in part to the prevalence of poverty in different places. So when I think of a future conservation, I think about equity for communities, I think about economic infrastructure that can help alleviate or hopefully eliminate poverty, so that we can really have humans in a good enough place, so that we can have the best speakers and the best minds and the best strategies available to protect nature and allow nature to thrive.
1:00:36 SC: That’s a good thing I think that we should all shoot for. Rae Wynn-Grant, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
1:00:41 RW: Thank you for having me, Sean, this was fun.
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The fascination is not strange, we practically are carnivores in evolutionary terms.
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