When Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya booted her computer system and linked it to a just recently recovered collar from an Andean bear, she had no concept what sort of video she may be ready to see.
“We had more than a thousand videos, so I simply picked random videos to play,” states Pillco, a wildlife ecologist at the Peruvian not-for-profit Amazon Conservation and a National Geographic Explorer. “At initially, it was simply fantastic to understand the cam worked.”
In videos shot throughout 4 months, a male bear nicknamed Chris took Pillco and her coworkers on a romp throughout a spectacular set of recently taped habits.
She shouted with delight as the tape exposed the collared bear, who had to do with 7 to 8 years of ages, swimming throughout a river, then enjoyed strangely enough as the animal demolished fruit, bromeliads, bugs, and even stinging nettles– a menu product nobody has actually ever recorded before in this little-studied types, likewise called the spectacled bear. (Related: “Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya: Protecting the legend of her youth, the Andean bear.”
Then, on December 18, 2023, a female Andean bear began to appear in the brief, 15-second clips the collar taped each hour.
Pillco and her associates viewed in wonder as the 2 bears stayed together for a complete week on the Andean slopes of southeastern Peru. The courtship consisted of fraternizing each other, sleeping beside each other, and ultimately, 8 different videos exposing the first-ever proof of Andean bear breeding activity.
The very best part? Obviously, Andean bears mate while balancing in the treetops.
Surprisingly, the researchers didn’t recognize the habits was unique till they began searching the clinical literature for other records of canopy breeding and turned up empty. American black bears are understood to climb up and even sleep in trees.
“We believed perhaps it was something typical in other bear types,” states Pillco, who led a research study revealing the findings December 4 in the journal Ecology and Evolution
“But it’s something brand-new. It’s something no one has actually reported and released about.”
More arboreal than your typical bear
Andean bears, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature thinks about susceptible to termination, are belonging to mountainous areas of South America, where they can be discovered throughout a range of environments and elevations. They’re most at home in the trees. (Read how poaching threatens Andean bears.)
“The muscles of the back legs are a little bigger than the front legs, which’s an adjustment for an arboreal life,” states Ximena Velez-Liendo, a Bolivia-based preservation researcher with the Chester Zoo in the United Kingdom.
Other tree-living attributes consist of sharp, curved claws for climbing up, along with the capability to develop big platforms in the forest canopy, which the bears utilize for rest and security.
“They can even bring prey as much as these platforms,” states Velez-Liendo,
