Feeding bears like dogs shortens their lives.
A new study in Scientific Reports on the diet of giant pandas and sloth bears adds to the evidence that bears are omnivores like humans.
Charles Robbins, a Washington State University wildlife biology professor, said that bears are not like cats where they eat a high-protein diet. The recommendation to feed polar bears, brown bears, and sloth bears is to feed them as if they are high-protein carnivore. Killing them slowly is what you do when you do that.
Researchers gave captive giant pandas and sloth bears unlimited food at different U.S. zoos to see their preferences and then recorded their nutrition.
Researchers from Texas A&M University and the Memphis Zoo collaborated to conduct feeding trials with a pair of giant pandas to measure bamboo selection. The giant pandas preferred the bamboo culm over the leaves because of its high levels of carbohydrate. They consumed culm almost exclusively in the month of March. The data from five Chinese zoos which had giant pandas that had successfully reproduced and found again was analyzed by the researchers.
Six sloth bears at the Cleveland, Little Rock and San Diego zoos were presented with an assortment of fruits and vegetables. They only ate the fat-rich avocados and ignored the apples. sloth bears preferred a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet which may have been similar to their wild diet of ants and termites
They are usually fed a high-fat diet in captivity. The lifespan of sloth bears in U.S. zoos is 17 years less than the maximum lifespan in human care. The most common cause of death is cancer.
The fat-rich diet of wild polar bears could be mimicked by captive polar bears if given the option. Most of the time, polar bears die 10 years earlier than they should. Many years of poorly balanced diet can cause inflammation in the organs that can lead to diseases.
The current study shows that captive bears will choose foods that are similar to wild bears' diet.
Robbins said that there's a long-standing idea that humans know more than a sloth bear or a brown bear. The bears have been evolving for 50 million years, and they know more about their diet than we do. One of the first to ask the bears what they wanted to eat was us. What causes you to feel good?
The founder of the Bear Center, Robbins, has been studying bear nutrition for decades. During a study in Alaska, he and his students began to investigate their misbalanced diet. The researchers thought that the bears would gorge on salmon, sleep, and eat more salmon.
They thought the bears would eat salmon, but instead they spent hours looking for and eating small berries. Robbins' laboratory began investigating diet with the bears housed at the Bear Center and found they gained the most weight when fed a combination of salmon and berries.
The ability to spread into more areas was given to the eight types of bears by the fact that they have evolved to eat a wide range of food.
Robbins said that it opens up so many more food resources than just being a high-protein carnivore.
More information: Charles T. Robbins et al, Ursids evolved early and continuously to be low-protein macronutrient omnivores, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19742-z Journal information: Scientific Reports
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