Brown Bears (Info, Pics and Videos)

[Shadow]

(11-22-2020, 12:36 AM)Shadow Wrote: I don´t know if this has been shared before, but interesting study concerning body mass and chest girth of Ussuri brown bears living at Hokkaido, Japan. These same bears live also in Russia at same areas with Siberian/Amur tigers.

For some reason I hadn´t seen this before. It has measurements and weights from longer period of time and it confirms that some Ussuri brown bears can be truly huge. Everyone can imagine what it looks like, when a bear can be over 500 kg heavy, chest girth 2,5 meters and standing clearly over 2,5 meters tall. 

Heaviest bear in this study was 520 kg (1146,5 lbs), biggest chest girth 250 cm (8,2 ft or 8 ft 2,4 in) and biggest body length from tip of the nose to rump 260 cm (8,5 ft or 8 ft 6,4 in).

I read this study just briefly now, but I recommend to read all of it if any interest towards brown bears.

Some quotes:

"Morphometric measurements including body length, chest girth, and body mass were obtained from Hokkaido brown bears harvested from the
population for conflict management for the 22 years from August 1991 through December 2012 (n ＝ 3,576; 2,347 males and 1,229 females). Body
length (cm) was measured from the nose tip to the anus. Chest girth (cm) was measured as the axillary girth just caudal to the scapula. Body
mass (kg) was determined by suspending bears from a spring scale or placing them on an electronic load scale. Data on the presence of
offspring, number of accompanying offspring, and estimated age of offspring of harvested bears was also collected from local government personnel
and hunters."

"Among bears with these measurements, body mass was 3-520 kg for males (n ＝ 642) and 8-204 kg for females (n ＝ 316), body length was 45-260 cm (n ＝ 2,347) and
50-280 cm (n ＝ 1,229), and chest girth was 23-250 cm (n ＝ 2,307) and 28-240 cm (n ＝ 1,218)."

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ev...db9ba6eff2

On interesting and a bit odd thing in this study is it, that when looking at figure 2 (Distribution of age - body mass...) there are so many big/very big male bears and then again some very young. When a 300 kg bear is based on chart maybe 2 years old it raises eyebrow. It can be of course that some age determinations have been incorrect. Very big number of bears included and maybe some errors because of it. 

Still even if some considering it, that some invalid information included this study has a lot of big bears weighing 300-400 kg and then 2-3 really big ones over 400 kg including that one 520 kg heavy. Based on this study it looks obvious, that these bears can really be said to be between of "normal" brown bears/grizzlies and Kodiak/Alaskan peninsula/Kamchatka peninsula bears in size. I don´t remember any other study with that many bears in between 300-400 kg what comes to "normal" brown bears and by this I mean brown bears with no access to rivers with salmon. Reply