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+--- Thread: Bear and bigcats anatomy (/topic-bear-and-bigcats-anatomy)
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-07-2016
Problem solved. As you said pictures of anatomy and their comparison is nice. I agree. Here are more,
*This image is copyright of its original author
This appears to be good, though i doubt it's authenticity regarding fast and slow twitch fibre distribution.
*This image is copyright of its original author
this one is good,
*This image is copyright of its original author
Fine,
*This image is copyright of its original author
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - Tshokwane - 12-07-2016
@parvez I don't know about its accuracy, but let me tell you that second drawing is awesome. Thanks for the share.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-07-2016
(12-07-2016, 07:36 PM)Majingilane Wrote: @parvez I don't know about its accuracy, but let me tell you that second drawing is awesome. Thanks for the share.
I agree. But i am on hunt for the best anatomy or muscle distribution pictures for tiger. I found those of grizzly bear. but I am unable to find skinned picture of a dead tiger. That would perfectly fit here.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-07-2016
Brain of cats and big cats, interesting reads,
I won't paste the information here, it will lead to unnecessary debates.
http://www.catster.com/lifestyle/cat-facts-anatomy-your-cats-brain
http://www.thetoptens.com/smartest-big-cats/
https://www.quora.com/Are-big-cats-smarter-than-domestic-cats
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - Pckts - 12-08-2016
(12-07-2016, 08:15 PM)parvez Wrote: Brain of cats and big cats, interesting reads,
I won't paste the information here, it will lead to unnecessary debates.
http://www.catster.com/lifestyle/cat-facts-anatomy-your-cats-brain
http://www.thetoptens.com/smartest-big-cats/
https://www.quora.com/Are-big-cats-smarter-than-domestic-cats
First link is on domestic cats
2nd and 3rd are man made lists.
Here's what we've discussed on the subject so far.
http://wildfact.com/forum/topic-are-tigers-brainier-than-lions?highlight=tigers+brain+lions
Nothing concrete other than brain size and some opinions, so the debate is still very much left to interpretation.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-08-2016
Other than brain size the cerebrum and cerebral cortex are very much complex in tigers. That is an additional feature in addition to brain size. This also means their behaviour is very complex.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-10-2016
Interesting article,
George Stevenson's brain appeared to be sweating, glistening on a bright red plastic picnic plate there in the heat of the day.
It was big as a big man's fist, and all around it, on other picnic plates, were slivers of other brains, like so many thin-sliced neural hors d'oeuvres. Some looked like spreading river deltas, carved deep with winding channels. One looked just like an elk hoof, stuffed tight with morel mushrooms.
With them on the table was a bone-white grizzly bear skull, top lopped to show inside, where Stevenson's juicy brown brain used to be. And beside that was a fully furred grizzly head, guillotined with eyes closed, ears perked up, sharp teeth curving over soft black lips.
These are the grisly tools Dr. Stevenson needs for his presentation: "Grizzly Bear Brain, Central Nervous System Structures."
"These bears are amazing creatures," Stevenson said. "I believe they have the most impressive olfactory system of any animal on the planet. Their nose is the very best."
Generally speaking, national park management, while admittedly complicated, is not brain surgery. Except today, when Stevenson, a pioneering neurosurgeon, has packed the room with Glacier National Park staffers for a brown-bag lunch seminar. Not a few of those brown bags were tucked quickly under chairs as Stevenson pried open the bear head and reached elbow-deep inside to point out its finer details.
Mostly, he was pointing out the snout, a full nine inches of highly evolved scent detection. It is, he said, like no other nose in the world.
A run-of-the-mill dog's sense of smell is roughly 100 times greater than a human's. A good hound dog's nose is perhaps 300 times better.
But a bear's scent system, Stevenson said, is at least seven times better than the hounds.
"It's remarkable," he said. "It's how they know the world."
When humans think about their hometowns, they think in terms of visual maps - down this street to that avenue, turn left at the bank, right at the stoplight. But bears don't see things that way. To get to their favorite huckleberry patch, they don't follow the trail to the tree with the broken limb, and then turn left at the big mossy rock.
"No, they have an olfactory map."
Take the scent of the trail to the smell of the anthill, then follow the smell of water to the perfume of huckleberries.
It is difficult, Stevenson said, for humans to imagine such a way of knowing, but for bears it's essential.
Each spring, when they emerge from the den, they are literally starving. There's no time to wander around and look for food, to look for tracks in the snow and to follow them, perhaps, to a protein meal.
"They have to smell food over huge distances, and then go straight to it," Stevenson said. "If they can't, they die."
An odd hobby
Stevenson was a neurosurgeon from 1965 until 1993, a pioneer of micro-neuro surgery. These days, he lives near Yellowstone National Park and is affiliated with the University of Wyoming.
Of late, he's been combining his lifelong career with his new neighbors the bears, and hopes to create a first-ever neuron-anatomy atlas of bear physiology, using brain anatomy to show how the big bruins work.
The biggest trouble, he said, is finding bear bodies to study. Part of his presentation includes a clip from a National Geographic documentary, in which he and his colleagues are seen sedating a bear and sliding her gently into the cavernous den of a modern MRI machine.
"You have to be very careful," he said, which seems a bit self-evident when you're talking about a bear in a hospital roo
The job is somewhat less nerve-wracking if the bear is dead. Occasionally, Stevenson said, wildlife officials will give him a call when a bear is killed. Then he rushes to Bozeman, where the state of Montana's wildlife laboratory is located - and the bear's head is drained of blood, pumped full of formaldehyde, stabilized and prepped for transport.
Then Stevenson puts it in his plastic cooler, hits the local grocery store for a bag or two of ice and heads for Missoula, where technicians at Community Medical Center work after-hours to make MRI images of bear brains.
It is, he admits, a decidedly odd hobby.
But it is paying off in terms of understanding how grizzly bears think and operate. Stevenson now knows, for instance, that the percentage of a bear's brain devoted to scent is at least five times greater than the percentage of human brain allocated to olfactory systems.
In other words, humans smell in black and white, while bears enjoy the full kaleidoscope.
"A polar bear will walk 100 miles in a straight line to reach a female ready to breed," he said. "That's what the bear's nose can do. They smell a million times better than we do."
A human brain weighs in at about 1,500 grams, huge compared to a 450-gram bear brain. And yet our olfactory bulb is the size of a pencil eraser. The bear's is the size of your thumb. That's a lot of smell power for such a small brain.
And even before the brain, he said, the bear's body is built to sniff.
The black pad on the bear's snout, like a dog's nose, is wired with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny muscles. Bears can manipulate their nostrils the way dexterous people control their nimble fingers.
The smells then travel up two 9-inch channels, with hundreds of times the surface area of a human's nose, to a spot where 10 million nerve strands and a billion receptor cells fire electrical signals directly into the brain, through countless tiny pathways and onto the brain's cribiform plate.
The large hippocampus "remembers" the scent, adding it to the mental map.
Just imagine the blinding brain punch a blast of pepper spray must deliver to that system.
"It's not just heat and discomfort," Stevenson said. "It actually scrambles the brain."
Inside a bear's head
Stevenson's research, like his lectures, rambles wildly, like a big-bottomed bear across a broad landscape. But stick with him, because he's on the scent, and is headed somewhere particular.
He moves on to bear sight. ("They definitely see in color, but not the way we do. We're totally visual. There's no way bears see as well as you and me.") And bear hearing. ("I think their hearing is quite good. It's nothing compared to that nose, though.") At some point, he said, he'd like to "stain" bear brain cells, so he can track sight and sound directly.
He travels to museums and to the Smithsonian, spinning tales of tracking bear skulls and bear brains from coast to coast. He dives into the cerebellum, the homunculus, the arcane reaches of creased and folded tissue.
He rumbles into the vomer-nasal passages, that curious place between smell and taste, then takes off into the frontal sinus. He stops just long enough to hand you a business card - it says only "Bear Brain Anatomy" - and then launches into the neurophysiology of mammalian auditory pathways.
"This is a whole new way of knowing the species," Stevenson says as he tucks his brain back into its clear plastic jug of formaldehyde. He stacks the picnic plates, and tucks the skulls back in their packing boxes.
"For me, this is absolutely fascinating - like getting inside a bear's head and seeing with his eyes, smelling with his nose. It gives people an idea of how they see us, which is not something people think about very much."
http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/getting-inside-bears-brains/article_b59f9959-ca5d-5ca5-b612-21a1e1b0bf59.html
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - brotherbear - 12-13-2016
http://www.futurity.org/intelligence-brain-size-1095812-2/
Polar bears prove smarter animals have bigger brains
Posted by Layne Cameron-Michigan State January 26th, 2016
Scientists have suspected that brain size is linked to intelligence, but there’s not been enough evidence to show that a bigger brain predicts cognitive ability.
To gather the evidence,researchers traveled to nine US zoos and presented 140 animals from 39 different mammalian carnivore species with a novel problem-solving task.
The study included polar bears, arctic foxes, tigers, river otters, wolves, spotted hyenas, and some rare, exotic species, such as binturongs, snow leopards, and wolverines.
Each animal was given 30 minutes to extract food from a metal box, closed with a bolt latch. The box was scaled to the animal’s size and baited with each study animal’s preferred food—red pandas received bamboo and snow leopards got steak.
“Does a larger brain imply greater intelligence?” asks George Gilchrist, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology, which helped fund the research. “This is a key question for those studying brain evolution.
“These researchers devised a clever puzzle that could be presented to multiple species—and discovered a strong correlation between relatively large brain size and problem-solving ability.”
70% success rate for bears
Overall, 35 percent of the animals successfully solved the problem. The bears had an almost 70 percent success rate, and meerkats and mongooses were the least successful, with no individuals from their species solving the problem.
“Our results are robust, showing that having a larger brain really does improve the animal’s ability to solve a problem it has never encountered before,” says Kay Holekamp, Michigan State University professor of integrative biology and the paper’s senior author.
“This study offers a rare look at problem solving in carnivores, and the results provide important support for the claim that brain size reflects an animal’s problem-solving abilities and enhance our understanding of why larger brains evolved in some species,” says Sarah Benson-Amram, University of Wyoming scientist and first author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study also showed that neither manual dexterity nor living in larger social groups improved problem-solving success.
“A hypothesis that has garnered much support in primate studies is ‘the social brain hypothesis,’ which proposes that larger brains evolved to deal with challenges in the social domain,” says Holekamp. “This hypothesis suggests that intelligence evolved to enable animals to anticipate, respond to and perhaps, even manipulate the actions of others in their social groups.
“If the social brain hypothesis can predict success at solving nonsocial problems, then we would expect that species that live in larger social groups should be more intelligent. However, we did not find any support for that prediction in this study.”
Scientists from the University of Michigan and University of Minnesota were also part of this research team.
NSF’s Divisions of Biological Infrastructure and Integrative Organismal Systems also provided support.
Source: Michigan State University
Original Study DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1505913113
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - brotherbear - 12-13-2016
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/08/120829-black-bears-cognition-animals-science/
Black Bears Can "Count" as Well as Primates
By Christine Dell'Amore, National Geographic News
PUBLISHED AUGUST 31, 2012
Do black bears count in the woods? Possibly, according to a recent study that shows the mammals are as smart as primates.
In experiments, captive bears showed that they could perform numerical tasks, including distinguishing the number of dots on an image.
Even though bears have the largest relative brain size of any carnivore (still not as big as primates), surprisingly little research has been done on their cognitive abilities, according to the study. (Read "Animal Minds" in National Geographic magazine.)
The new research shows for the first time that "bears and other animals that have been neglected by cognitive scientists ... may show abilities similar to species more like humans," study co-author Jennifer Vonk, a comparative psychologist at the University of Oakland in Rochester, Michigan, said by email.
Will Work for Food
For the experiment, three black bears in their enclosure in Alabama's Mobile Zoo were given the opportunity to approach a touch-screen computer on a rolling cart. The large carnivores, which are generally "motivated to work for food," proved willing participants, Vonk said.
When a bear walked up to the computer, the screen flashed two images—for instance, a set of large dots and a set of small dots, which were both randomly colored black or red. Each bear was already trained to touch the computer with its nose or paw, and would do this to choose an image, according to the study, published in June in the journal Animal Behaviour.
If the bear touched the "correct" category—randomly determined by the scientists—the computer beeped melodically and the animal got a food reward. If the bear touched the incorrect category, the computer buzzed and the next pair of images was shown.
To show if the bear had learned what image was correct (say, a high or low number of dots), the scientists showed them a new set of images that were of the same type as the previous ones.
The results showed all the bears were able to choose the correct image that got them food. It set the stage to look closer at their ability to "count."
(See National Geographic's bear videos.)
"Counting" Bear
A further experiment discovered that one bear, named Brutus, could also discriminate numbers.
Brutus was shown two images—one with a set of large dots and another with a set of small dots. This was followed by another two images, in each of which the dots were moving and placed on a background of a different size than the previous images.
The bear still chose the correct image despite these "conflicting cues," suggesting he can "count" the dots to distinguish the one to get him a treat, Vonk said. (Watch video: "Smart Animals.")
Even so, "it's too early to call it counting per se," she noted.
Because the task was voluntary, Vonk struggled with the bears all trying to participate at once—knowing a treat was imminent. "The hardest part was giving only one access to the screen," she said. (See bear pictures.)
Dave Garshelis, who was not involved in the study but serves as bear project leader at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said that the bears may have found it relatively easy to respond to the color of the dots because they resemble berries, one of the black bear's main food sources.
For instance, black bears are able to discern the preferred ripe blackberries—which are black—from unripe blackberries, which are red.
He also added that the experiment was geared toward visual acuity—the most comfortable sense for humans, but not so much for bears, whose sense of smell is a thousand times greater than a person's.
In the experiment, "you've actually stripped them of their main sense that they make decisions by, which is their sense of smell," he said.
Garshelis suspects the bears would have performed even better on the tests if there'd been smells emanating from the screen.
Bears Evolved Smarts to Find Food?
It makes sense that bears would be smart—as loner omnivores, the animals must problem solve to root out a variety of food sources, the authors noted.
(See "Fish as Good as College Students in Numbers Test.")
Garshelis agreed that bears' cognitive abilities may result from them having to respond to rapidly changing food sources.
"Imagine if you were on a buffet line and you're moving through and making the choice of what to put on your plate, and the people who set the food up are constantly changing it in front of you and you never know what's coming," he said.
That's what bears face when finding fruit each summer, which can be abundant one year but scarce the next, he said.
Roger Powell, a bear expert at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, agreed, adding via email, "All I can say is that from over 20 years of doing research on bears, I was constantly impressed with their intelligence.
"They are highly adapted to find new foods that become available and to take advantage of foods that are very different and that must be acquired in new ways the bears have never used before," said Powell, who was not involved in the research.
Overall, the finding may open up possibilities for comparing the cognitive abilities of bears and primates, Vonk said. Primates have been performing computerized tasks for decades.
"It is exciting to consider," the study said, "that such divergent species can be tested in the same way to promote a fuller picture" of animal smarts.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-13-2016
One of the main differences between bears and big cats is that of presence of more number of fast twitch fibres in gastrocnemius muscles in big cats the reason why they leap for longer distances at one stretch.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - Polar - 12-13-2016
@parvez,
I can actually agree to that for once.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-13-2016
(12-13-2016, 12:52 PM)Polar Wrote: @parvez,For once? What do you mean?
I can actually agree to that for once.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - Polar - 12-13-2016
@parvez,
This is the first of your theories that I have ever agreed with.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - parvez - 12-13-2016
Well it doesn't matter if you personally agree or not. I simply do not bother. I just post. This one is not my theory. This is fact from a website. I will post source when I get onto pc.
RE: Bear and bigcats anatomy - brotherbear - 12-13-2016
(12-13-2016, 12:47 PM)parvez Wrote: One of the main differences between bears and big cats is that of presence of more number of fast twitch fibres in gastrocnemius muscles in big cats the reason why they leap for longer distances at one stretch.
Also, a longer more flexible spine, a lighter-built skeleton and the construction of the cat's legs. Cats are perfectly designed for stalk and pounce.