I want you to picture a forest, let's say Northern
Europe, and let's dial the clock back, oh, about
2 ,000 years. Okay, I'm with you. You're sitting
around a fire with your tribe. It's dark, the
woods are thick, and you can hear the wind howling
a little. You're talking about the hunt, maybe
the weather, the spirits of the trees, but there's
one thing, one specific thing that you absolutely
do not talk about. You're setting a pretty spooky
scene here to kick things off. I am, because
I'm talking about a taboo. A taboo so strong
that it actually changed the English language
forever. That's a big claim. Well, think about
it. We have words for wolf, fox, deer. These
are ancient, original names. They go way, way
back to the roots of our language. Yeah. But
the word we use for the apex predator of those
woods, the king of the forest. Yeah. It's a lie.
It is. It's a complete fabrication. It's a placeholder.
Today on the Deep Drive, we are talking about
the bear. And I think the best place to start,
I mean, it has to be, is with that word itself.
Because bear isn't its name, is it? No, it's
not. Not its true name, anyway. From a linguistic
perspective, bear... is basically a nickname
that got, well, completely out of hand. A nickname.
Yeah. If you trace the etymology back, it comes
from the Old English word bara, and that links
back to these proto -Germanic roots that just
mean the brown one. The brown one. That sounds
like something straight out of a Tolkien novel.
Like a character name. It does, but the reasoning
was incredibly practical. It's a euphemism. The
theory, and it's a very strong one, it's supported
by a lot of historical linguistics, is that the
proto -Germanic peoples were just genuinely terrified
of this animal. So terrified they couldn't even
say its name. They believed in a sort of magical
causality. If you spoke the true name of the
beast, you might summon it. Like Beetlejuice.
If you say his name three times. Essentially,
yes. Or, you know, Voldemort. He who must not
be named. It's the same principle. Right. You
have to put yourself in their shoes. For these
tribes, a bear wasn't just an animal. It was.
It was a monster. It could stand on two legs
like a man. It could disappear into the earth
for the winter and then come back to life in
the spring. A symbol of resurrection. Exactly.
And it could kill you with a single swipe of
its paw. So out of pure fear, they just stopped
saying the true name. They called it the brown
one. And the crazy part, the part that really
gets me, is that we did this so effectively that
we actually lost the real name. We did. It was
a conscious effort that became an unconscious
habit. And it just, it wiped the word from the
entire Germanic branch of languages. It's gone.
So how do we even know it's missing? Well, we
can guess at it by looking at other languages
that didn't have this specific taboo. You look
at the Greek Arcturus or the Latin Ursus. Ah,
so Ursa Major. Precisely. The original Proto
-Indo -European word was probably something like
Ercto. But in English and German and Swedish,
the true name is gone, extinct, wiped from the
vocabulary. That is such a heavy way to start
an episode. It really frames how we've always
seen this animal, doesn't it? It's always been
this figure of myth and deep primal fear. Absolutely.
But our mission today is to strip away that Brown
One label. We want to find the actual creature
that's hiding underneath the euphemism. And the
creature underneath... is well it's fascinating
because it is a walking contradiction it really
is i was looking through the source material
you sent over and my biggest takeaway was that
bears don't seem to know what they want to be
how do you mean well they have the digestive
system of a pure carnivore but most of them eat
berries they look like big dogs but they move
and stand up like people they're these massive
high calorie burning machines yet they've completely
mastered the art of doing absolutely nothing
for months at a time that's the ursidian paradox
as some biologists call it they are members of
the order carnivora that have for the most part
abandoned meat an apex predator that's mostly
vegetarian exactly they're often more peaceful
than we give them credit for and biologically
Oh, biologically. They have solved medical problems
like muscle atrophy, kidney failure, that modern
science is still just scratching its head over.
We are definitely going to get into the medical
miracle of hibernation later on because the fact
that they don't pee for 100 days is, well, it's
both disturbing and incredibly impressive. Physiological
masterpiece. There's no other word for it. But
first, I want to figure out what a bear actually
is. Because when I go to the zoo or I see a grizzly
in a nature documentary, my brain automatically
categorizes it as big dog. Which is fair. It's
an understandable classification. Is it accurate,
though? It is, to a point. Texonomically, they
are caniforms. That literally means dog -like
carnivorans. Okay, so there is a link. A very
old one. If you go back about, say, 40 or 50
million years, the ancestors of dogs and the
ancestors of bears were undeniably cousins. They
split from a common lineage. They share a lot
of the same hardware, you know. Non -retractable
claws, similar snout structures. But they aren't
dogs. They're not just giant Labradors. No. They
split off a long, long time ago. And this is
where the family tree gets really interesting.
If you want to find the bear's closest living
relative. The one you could do a DNA test on
today and get the closest map. Exactly. You don't
look at the wolf. You don't even look on land.
Wait, what? Where do you look? You look in the
ocean. You're kidding me. Not at all. You look
at the pinnipeds. Pinnipeds, you mean like seals.
Sea lions. Seals, sea lions, walruses. Genetically,
they are the bear's sister group. My mind is
officially blown. A grizzly bear walking through
Yellowstone is basically a... A land seal. Or
a seal is a water bear. Both statements are true.
Morphologically and molecularly, they are sisters.
They split off from a common ancestor. What was
that ancestor? Do we know? We do. We have fossils.
They're a group called the Amphicenodontinae.
Amphicenodontinae. Okay, try saying that three
times fast. I'd rather not. But just picture
a creature that looks like a mix between a small
bear, an otter, and maybe a beaver. So a little
water weasel thing. A semi -aquatic mammal, yeah.
And at some point in their history, one group
of them decided, you know what, the water is
great, let's just go all in. Those became the
seals and walruses. And the other group? The
other group said, nah, we prefer dry land, thanks.
And they evolved into the bears we know today.
Is there definitive fossil proof of this? Or
is this just kind of pieced together from DNA?
Oh, there's proof. There's a really famous fossil
called Kuihila darwini, which was found up in
the Canadian Arctic. It's often nicknamed a walking
seal. A walking seal. It had these big webbed
feet, but it also had long legs and a long tail.
It looked a lot like a modern otter, but the
skull? The skull was undeniably bear -like. It's
the perfect missing link that connects that grizzly
in the mountains to the walrus on an ice floe.
That actually explains the swimming. I mean,
we've all seen polar bears swim, and that makes
sense. They live on ice. But I've seen footage
of black bears and brown bears just swimming
across these massive lakes, and they look so
incredibly comfortable in the water. It's in
their blood. Or rather, it's deep in their ancient
history. Even a black bear living in the middle
of Tennessee has that deep ancestral memory of
being semi -aquatic. It's just baked into their
biology. So, okay. We have this water -loving
ancestor, this walking seal. How do we get from
that to the massive Kodiak bears of today? Because
the sources mentioned an early ancestor called
Perictus. Well, it wasn't very impressive. Perictus.
No, not impressive at all. If you saw one running
around in the late Eocene about 38 million years
ago, you wouldn't run away screaming. You'd probably
try to pet it. How small are we talking? raccoon
sized maybe even smaller think of a very small
slender badger a badger bear basically it was
living in a world that was much warmer much more
tropical than today it was a little scavenger
eating insects maybe some small lizards it was
an underdog really so it took a long time for
the bear lineage to bulk up millions of years
The real grandfather of all the modern bears
is a genus called Ursavus, which showed up in
the Alligocene. That's when you start to see
the real size increase and, crucially, the teeth
starting to change to handle more vegetation.
And from Ursavus, the family tree just basically
explodes. It branches out, yeah. It really diversifies.
And this is where we get the cast of characters
for the modern bear family. And the very first
one to pack its bags and leave the family reunion
was the panda. The panda is always the outlier.
outlier isn't it in almost every single way Genetically,
the ancestors of the giant panda, that's the
subfamily Eluropodinae, diverged from the main
bear line about 19 million years ago. 19 million.
That is a massive separation. It's huge. To put
that in perspective for you, humans and chimpanzees
only split maybe 6 or 7 million years ago. Pandas
have been doing their own thing, completely separate
from all other bears, for nearly 20 million years.
It actually explains so much why they look so
different, why they act so different. Precisely.
There are the weird cousins. that moved to a
commune up in the mountains and just stopped
answering emails. While all the other bears were
evolving to hunt or scavenge across these diverse
landscapes, the panda backed itself into an evolutionary
corner with bamboo. We are definitely going to
do a deep dive on the panda problem later on,
how an animal survives on what is essentially
cardboard. Yeah. But I want to stick to the timeline
for now. So the panda leaves. What happens next?
Then you get the invasion of the Americas. A
group called the Tree Martinae, or the short
-faced bears, makes its way across. The sources
describe these things as the terrors of the Ice
Age. And they were. They were absolute nightmares.
Specifically, a species called Arctodosimus,
the giant short -faced bear. How big are we talking?
Standing on its hind legs, it was maybe 12 feet
tall. It had these long, lanky legs, almost like
a hyena. It was built for running down prey on
the open plains of Ice Age America. Unlike modern
bears, which are built for stability, these things
were built for speed and devastating power. They
were the dominant megafauna predator in North
America for a very long time. And they're all
gone now. Almost all of them. The Ice Age ended,
the megafauna they preyed on died out, and they
couldn't adapt. But there is one survivor. One
lonely descendant of that terrifying lineage
still alive today. The spectacled bear. The spectacled
bear, yes. Down in the Andes Mountains of South
America. It's much smaller, it's very shy, it
mostly eats fruit and bromeliads. But if you
look at its genetics, it is the last of the short
-faced giants. That's kind of tragic in a way.
Evolution is often tragic, but it's also incredibly
prolific. Because while the short -faced bears
were dying out, Another subfamily, the ursinae,
the modern bears, was taking over the entire
world. So this is where we get the ones we know
today. This is the explosion that happened about
5 million years ago. This gives us the American
black bear, the brown bear, the sun bear in Asia,
the sloth bear in India. And the king of the
north, the polar bear, where does he fit in?
The polar bear is the new kid on the block. He's
the latest model off the production line. How
new are we talking? Shockingly new. The genetic
evidence suggests that polar bears diverged from
a population of brown bears only about 400 ,000
years ago. Wait, only 400 ,000? Yeah. In evolutionary
time, that is. That's the blink of an eye. It's
nothing. It's yesterday. So what happened? Some
brown bears just wandered north, got stuck by
glaciers during an ice age, and turned white.
That is essentially it. A population got isolated,
probably around the British Isles, and they adapted
with frightening speed. What kind of adaptations?
Well, they went from being omnivores eating berries
and salmon to being hyper carnivores that survive
almost exclusively on seal blubber. Their fur
turned white. Well, technically it's transparent
hollow hairs, but it looks white for camouflage.
Their paws became these massive webbed paddles
for swimming. Their necks got longer to keep
their heads above water when they hunt. And because
it was so recent, they're still genetically compatible,
right? They can interbreed. Yes, absolutely.
A brown bear and a polar bear can still mate
and produce fertile offspring. They call them
piddly bears or growler bears. A growler bear.
That sounds like a creature from a Dungeons and
Dragons campaign. It kind of looks like one,
too. They often have the white fur but with brown
patches and they have the humped back of a grizzly
but the longer neck of a polar bear. It's a living
walking reminder of just how closely related
these two species still are. It really highlights
that adaptability you mentioned earlier. The
bear family seems to have a tool for every single
job. You have the panda eating bamboo, the polar
bear hunting seals on the ice, the sloth bear
sucking termites out of mounds in India. And
yet underneath all of that incredible specialization,
the basic chassis is the same, the skeleton,
the muscles, the brain. It's all unmistakably.
bear. And that chassis is built very, very differently
from the other carnivores we know. That's the
perfect segue. I want to talk about that chassis
because when I see a wolf run, it flows. It's
graceful. When I see a bear move, well, it lumbers.
It looks heavy. Why is the design so different?
It all comes down to their feet and how they
walk. Their feet. Yeah. If you look at a cat
or a dog or even that wolf you mentioned, they
are walking on their toes. It's a posture called
being digitigrade. It's like they are wearing
high heels all the time. And that gives them
speed. Exactly. That leverage gives them that
explosive springy speed. But bears aren't wearing
high heels. No. Bears are wearing combat boots.
They are planet grade. They walk with their entire
foot from the toe all the way to the heel flat
on the ground, just like you and I do. So what's
the evolutionary tradeoff there? Because if I'm
an apex predator, don't I want speed? You want
speed if you're chasing gazelles across the savannah.
But bears aren't endurance runners. Their tradeoff
is for stability and power. How does walking
flat -footed give them power? By having that
flat foot, a bear has a much lower center of
gravity and just incredible balance. This allows
them to do two things that wolves can't. First,
they can stand up comfortably on their hind legs
for long periods of time. Which is terrifying
when you see it in the wild. It makes them look
uncannily human. It does, and it lets them survey
the landscape, smell the wind from a higher vantage
point, and intimidate rivals. But the second
advantage is grappling. Grappling. A bear can
fight with its front paws because its back legs
are solid anchors on the ground. A wolf has to
bite. A bear can literally wrestle you to the
ground. It also frees up those front paws to
do more than just run. Exactly. This is a huge
point. Because they aren't relying on their front
paws for that explosive speed, they've retained
a level of dexterity that is really rare in large
carnivores. They can rotate their forearms. They
can grasp things. I read about them being able
to peel fruit. Oh, easily. A bear can hold a
fish between its paws. It can tear open a log
to get at grubs. Or it can delicately pluck individual
berries from a bush. In the case of the panda,
they've even evolved a false thumb. It's an enlarged
wrist. bone just for the purpose of holding bamboo
stems. A false thumb. It's a level of object
manipulation that you usually only see in primates.
Now, you mentioned they stand up to smell the
wind. The sources were pretty emphatic about
their sense of smell. We always hear about bloodhounds,
but the bear is in a totally different league.
The bloodhound is the gold standard for dogs,
but the bear is the gold standard for mammals,
period. The olfactory bulb in a bear's brain,
that's the part that processes smell, is up to
five times larger than a human's, and it's significantly
larger than even a dog's. Can we even quantify
that? What does that mean in the real world?
How much better is it? It's hard to put a number
on it, but think of it this way. A human navigates
the world primarily by sight. We see a mountain,
we walk toward it. A bear navigates by creating
a scent map of its world. A scent map. They aren't
just smelling a dead deer. They are smelling
the 3D geometry of the wind currents carrying
that scent. They can detect a carcass from 20
miles away if the wind is right. They can smell
a female in estrus from miles and miles away.
They can smell grubs buried inside a log. That's
a superpower. And to go with that super nose,
they have pretty good eyes too, right? Unlike
most carnivores, they have color vision. Yes.
Most keneads, like dogs, are red -green colorblind,
but bears have color vision that's very similar
to ours. Why? What's the advantage? Because they
need to spot ripe fruit. A patch of red berries
against a backdrop of green leaves is almost
invisible to a dog, but for a bear, it pops like
a neon sign. This brings us right back to that
digestive paradox I mentioned at the start. We
have this animal with the nose of a super predator,
the claws of a digger, and the eyes of a fruit
gatherer. But then you look at the gut. And the
gut is where things get really confusing. Anatomy
-wise, a bear is a carnivore. It has a single
stomach, a very short, small intestine, and no
cecum. Okay, remind me what a cecum is again.
It's a pouch in the digestive tract. In true
herbivores, like horses or rabbits, the cecum
is this big fermentation tank. It's filled with
specialized bacteria that break down tough plant
cellulose so the animal can actually get energy
from it. Bears don't have one. So if they eat
a salad, it passes right through them. Largely,
yes. They are incredibly inefficient at digesting
plants. And yet, for most bears, brown bears,
black bears' plants make up a huge percentage
of their diet. Roots, grasses, berries. So they're
just running a volume game. They just have to
eat constantly. Exactly. They have to eat massive
amounts because they aren't extracting all the
nutrients from what they consume. But the most
extreme, almost absurd example of this inefficiency
is the giant panda. The panda problem. It really
is a biological problem. Here you have an animal
that eats bamboo, which is almost entirely tough
cellulose for 99 % of its diet. Right. But it
still has the short, carnivorous gut of a bear.
It has the genes for digesting meat, not plants.
It completely lacks the specialized gut microbes
that other herbivores use to break down cellulose
efficiently. So how is it alive? How does that
even work? By doing absolutely nothing else but
eating. Because they digest less than 20 % of
what they eat, they have to process about 20
to 40 pounds of bamboo every single day. 40 pounds?
To do that, they have to eat for 12 to 15 hours
a day. Their entire life is just a desperate
race to consume enough calories to not starve.
That sounds miserable. It's an evolutionary trap.
They found a food source that no one else wanted,
bamboo, so there was no competition. But the
cost is that they have to spend their entire
waking life just chewing. And because they get
so little energy from it, they can't afford to
move much. That's why pandas seem so lazy. They're
not lazy. They're energy bankrupt. And then on
the complete other end of the dietary spectrum,
you have the sloth bear. I saw the note about
its teeth and I had to double check it because
I thought it was a typo. The vacuum cleaner adaptation.
It's amazing. The sloth bear in India eats termites
and ants. To do this, it has evolved to lose
its two upper front teeth, the incisors. It just
has a gap in its grill. A permanent gap. They
can seal their lips around a termite hole, close
their nostrils so they don't inhale bugs, and
then suck air through that gap in their teeth.
So it's literally a vacuum. A high -powered organic
vacuum. is incredibly loud. You can apparently
hear it from hundreds of yards away. It's just
amazing how the face and the habits can change
so drastically. But the gut remains this stubborn
primitive carnivore tube. It just shows that
evolution works with what it has. It doesn't
design perfection from scratch. It hacks together
solutions that are good enough. To survive. Speaking
of good enough, let's talk about the thing that
bears do better than almost any other animal
on Earth. Hibernation. The metabolic miracle.
Yeah. We grew up thinking, oh, the bear just
sleeps. It's cartoon image. You know, the bear
puts on a nightcap, gets into a cozy bed and
wakes up in the spring. But the reality is so
much more alien than that. It is not sleep. Let's
be very, very clear about that. Sleep is a brain
state. Hibernation is a total metabolic overhaul.
It is a state of dormancy that pushes the very
boundaries of what is biologically possible for
a mammal of that size. Okay, so let's look at
the stats. What happens to the engine when they
park the car for the winter? First, let's talk
about the heart rate. A normal resting heart
rate for a bear is around 55 beats per minute.
When it goes into the den, that drops. To what,
30? As low as nine beats per minute. Nine. No
way. The laws is to tap a slow rhythm. But beat.
Long pause. Beat. That's essentially dead. It's
hovering right on the edge. But here's the really
weird catch. In small hibernators like ground
squirrels or bats, their body temperature drops
to near freezing. They basically become little
ice cubes. Right. But the bear. its body temperature
only drops a few degrees maybe from 37 degrees
celsius down to 33 degrees or 30 degrees c why
keep the heat on if the heart is barely beating
that seems like a huge waste of precious energy
it's very expensive energetically speaking yes
but they do it for two critical reasons one Defense.
Defense. If a wolf or a wolverine crawls into
a ground squirrel's burrow, that squirrel is
a frozen popsicle. It can't move. It takes hours
for it to warm up. But if a threat enters a bear
den, the bear is warm enough that it can wake
up and fight almost instantly. Wow. Okay. And
the second reason. The cubs. Bears give birth
in the middle of winter in the den. You cannot
nurse and raise tiny, hairless, helpless newborns
if your body is at zero degrees Celsius. The
mother has to be a radiant heater for them. We'll
get to the cubs. That's a whole other story.
But I want to stay on the physiology for a second.
The sources mentioned a specific protein called
myosin. This seemed to be the secret sauce for
how the heart can do this. This is brand new
science, and it's incredible. Myosin is the protein
in our muscle fibers that makes them contract.
In a normal state, our muscles are always burning
a little bit of energy, a little bit of ATP,
even when they're at rest. Just to maintain tone.
Right. But in hibernating bears, their myosin
shifts into what scientists are calling a super
relaxed state. The molecules physically rearrange
themselves to stop consuming ATP. So they just
disconnect the battery from the muscle. Effectively,
yes. This allows the heart to beat that slowly
without the muscle tissue degrading and without
burning through their precious fat stores too
quickly. It's molecular efficiency at the highest
possible level. But the thing that really stops
me in my tracks, the thing that I think most
listeners will have a hard time believing. is
the bathroom situation. The no bathroom rule.
Walk us through this because it sounds like science
fiction. It is simple and frankly terrifying.
A hibernating bear does not eat, does not drink,
does not urinate, and does not defecate for up
to 100 days, sometimes even longer. Okay, let's
break that down. Let's start with urination.
If I, a human, didn't pee for a week, I would
be dead. You would die of uremic poisoning, yes.
Your kidneys filter waste, specifically a compound
called urea, out of your blood. Urea is the byproduct
of breaking down protein. If you don't pee it
out, it builds up in your blood, becomes toxic
ammonia, and it kills you. So how does the bear
not poison itself? This is the absolute genius
part of the whole system. The bear recycles it.
It recycles its pee. It recycles the urea. Instead
of sending the urea -rich blood to the kidneys
to be filtered out, the bear's body takes that
urea and pumps it back into the blood and then
into the gut. Into the gut. What for? Yes. In
the gut, there are specific bacteria that break
the urea down into ammonia. And then, and this
is the magic trick, the bear's liver takes that
ammonia and uses it to build new amino acids.
specifically an amino acid called glutamine.
Wait, hold on. So they're taking the toxic waste
product that usually kills you and they were
turning it back into the fundamental building
blocks of muscle. Exactly. They are literally
turning their own pee into protein. This is the
secret to why bears don't lose significant muscle
mass in the winter. If you laid in a hospital
bed for three months, your muscles would atrophy
to nothing. You'd be weak as a kitten. A bear
wakes up strong because it has been synthesizing
new protein from its own waste the entire time.
That is a perfect closed loop system. It's like
a space station. It is the ultimate biological
recycling plant. It's magnificent. Yeah, the
other end of the system. The solid waste. Well,
since they aren't eating, there isn't much new
waste being produced. But there are cells shedding
from the intestinal wall, hair they swallow while
grooming before they go to sleep. All this stuff
forms what's called a fecal plug in the lower
colon. A plug. A literal plug. It's a hard, dry
mass of hair, cells, and plant material that
blocks the exit. It keeps everything sealed up
tight until spring. When they wake up, expelling
that plug is the very first order of business.
I can only imagine. It's just incredible that
evolution figured this out. Don't waste the nitrogen.
Let's build biceps with it instead. And interestingly,
size acts as a constraint here. The system works
best when you are big, but the smaller bears
can actually hibernate for longer periods than
the really massive males. How does that work?
Because they have a better surface area to volume
ratio, they can lower their metabolic rate more
easily and cool down more efficiently. The massive
boars have a harder time shedding heat, so they
burn through their energy reserves faster. So
the big dog is actually a very delicate thermal
engine. Precisely. Okay, let's step out of the
den now. The bear wakes up. It pulls the plug,
literally. What is their life like out in the
world? Yeah. Because based on all the research,
they seem like the ultimate loners. They are.
With the major exception of a mother and her
cubs, bears are fundamentally asocial animals.
They don't have packs like wolves. They don't
have herds. They actively avoid each other. But
wait, we've all seen the videos. The famous ones
from Brooks Walls in Alaska. There are 20, 30
bears all standing in the river at once during
the salmon run. That is the exception that proves
the rule. Bears are pragmatic. They will tolerate
each other's presence only when a resource is
so overwhelmingly abundant, like a massive salmon
run, that fighting over it isn't worth the energy.
There's enough for everyone. So they're not hanging
out. They're just commuting to the same cafeteria.
Exactly. And if you watch those videos closely,
they aren't being social. They are maintaining
a very strict personal bubble. There is a clear
hierarchy in place. How is that hierarchy established?
By size and aggression. brutal system the biggest
most dominant males get the best fishing spots
the ones at the top of the falls where the salmon
literally jump right into their mouths and everyone
else the females the younger sub -adults they
get the perimeter they have to wait for scraps
downstream and if you step out of line if a younger
bear tries to take a prime spot Swift and decisive
violence. If you ever see footage of those old
male bears up close, you'll see their faces are
just covered in scars. Their ears are torn and
they have missing patches of fur. Those are the
receipts of a lifetime of enforcing dominance.
So if they don't like to fight unless they have
to, how do they communicate? If I'm a bear and
I want to tell you to back off without actually
biting you, what do I do? You use a whole suite
of sound and body language. We all think of the
big roar. But bears are actually much more subtle
than that. If a bear is stressed or annoyed,
it does something called jaw popping. Jaw popping.
What does that sound like? It's a loud crack.
They snap their jaws together with incredible
force. It sounds like a gunshot or a dry branch
breaking. It's a very clear, unambiguous signal.
I am anxious. I am dangerous. Go away now. Are
there friendly sounds? They also leave messages
for each other, right? I was reading about the
scent marking. It sounded like they're treating
the forest like a community bulletin board. They
absolutely are. A big male bear will find a prominent
tree on a trail, stand up on his hind legs to
his full height, and rub his back and shoulders
against it. He's grinding his personal scent
deep into the bark. Then he might turn around
and bite the tree, tearing out huge chunks of
it. So he's leaving a message that says, I smell
this strong and my mouth is this high off the
ground. Exactly. It's a measurement. If another
smaller bear comes along and smells that mark,
but his own nose is two feet lower than the bite
mark, he knows, OK, the guy who lives here is
a giant. I should probably just keep moving and
avoid trouble. And the panda, being the panda,
has to do it differently, of course. Of course.
The panda has specialized scent glands under
its tail. It secretes this waxy substance. And
to get it as high up on a tree as possible, a
panda will essentially do a handstand. A handstand.
They back up to the tree with their hind legs
walking up the trunk until they're almost upside
down, just to leave their mark as high as they
possibly can. That is a hilarious image. An acrobatic
pee contest. It works for them. And for polar
bears living out on the sea ice, the problem
is that there are no trees, so they leave scent
in their footprints. In the snow. How does that
work? They have sweat glands in their paws. As
they walk across the ice, they leave a chemical
trail. In the endless, featureless white void
of the Arctic, those footprints are the only
road signs. A male polar bear can follow a female's
tracks for days just by the scent she leaves
behind in the ice crystals. Let's talk about
that female. Because the reproduction cycle of
the bear is... Well, the word bizarre is the
only one that comes to mind. It features a very
clever biological trick called delayed implantation.
A biological pause button. The ultimate pause
button. So bears will mate in the late spring
or early summer. The egg is fertilized. It divides
a few times to become a blastocyst. Just a...
tiny ball of cells. But then it stops. It doesn't
attach to the uterine wall. It just floats there
in suspended animation. For how long? For months.
All through the summer and into the late autumn.
What is the logic there? Why not just start growing
the baby right away? Because the mother doesn't
know if she's going to have a good year yet.
She needs to spend the entire summer and autumn
just eating. She needs to pack on hundreds of
pounds of fat to survive the winter and produce
milk. If she gets to November and she's skinny,
her body makes a calculated decision. decision.
We can't afford this. The embryo is simply reabsorbed.
No pregnancy that year. That is incredibly smart.
It's like a biological escrow account. It's crucial
for survival. But if she is fat enough, if she
has enough reserves, her hormones send a signal,
the egg implants and gestation finally begins.
But because it starts so late in the year, the
actual gestation is incredibly short. Only about
six to eight weeks of real development. And that
leads to the impossibly tiny babies. Absurdly
tiny. A mother grizzly can weigh 700 pounds.
Our newborn cub weighs less than one pound. It's
the size of a chipmunk. It's born blind, virtually
hairless, and completely helpless. It's the highest
size ratio between mother and newborn in placental
mammals, right? Aside from marsupials like kangaroos,
yes. It only works because the den acts as a
kind of external womb. The mother is hibernating,
but her milk production is high. The cubs just
latch on and grow in the dark, safe and warm,
fueled by the fat she spent all summer storing.
But safety is relative. The outline mentioned
infanticide. This is the very dark side of bear
behavior. It is brutal, but from a certain point
of view, it's cold evolutionary math. Male bears
will actively hunt and kill cubs that are not
their own. Why? That seems so counterproductive
for the species as a whole. Evolution doesn't
care about the species. It cares about the individual's
genes getting passed on. Here is the logic. A
female bear with cubs will not mate. She is completely
devoted to raising them for two to three years.
She is off the market. So she's unavailable.
Right. Now, if a new dominant male comes into
the territory and kills those cubs, the female's
lactation stops. Her hormones reset. And she
goes back into estrus. She becomes ready to mate
again, usually within just a few days. So by
killing the cubs. By killing the cubs, the male
gets a chance to father his own offspring immediately,
rather than having to wait three years for her
to be receptive again. That is just grim. It
is nature red in tooth and claw. And this is
why female bears with cubs are so terrifyingly
aggressive. A mother bear knows that any strange
male she encounters is a lethal threat to her
genetic legacy. She isn't just protecting her
babies in an abstract, affectionate way. She's
protecting her entire lifetime reproductive success.
She will fight a male twice her size to the death
to protect them. That really changes the perspective
on the whole mama bear trope. It's not just about
affection. It's a desperate life or death defense
against a very real biological threat. Exactly.
Let's pivot now. We've looked at the biology,
the history, the behavior. Now we're looking
in the mirror at us, at the relationship between
humans and bears. A relationship that is as old
as humanity itself. We started with the linguistic
taboo, but the connection goes so much deeper
than that. It goes all the way to the stars.
Bursa Major. The Great Bear. This is one of the
few constellations that actually looks somewhat
like what it's supposed to be. But the research
suggests that seeing a bear in those stars isn't
just some random coincidence. No, this is one
of the most fascinating pieces of comparative
anthropology. Cultures all across the Northern
Hemisphere, from the ancient Greek poets to the
Native American tribes of the Iroquois and the
Algonquin, all looked at that same square of
stars in the handle and said, that is a bear.
How is that possible? Those cultures were separated
by thousands of miles and thousands of years.
The leading theory is that the story, the cosmic
hunt myth, is older than the separation of those
peoples. It likely dates back to the Paleolithic
era, more than 13 ,000 years ago. When the first
humans crossed the Bering land bridge from Asia
into the Americas, they brought the story of
the great bear in the sky with them. That gives
me chills. So when you and I look up at the Big
Dipper, we are seeing a story that our ancestors
were telling each other in caves during the Ice
Age. Exactly. And in most versions of the myth,
the bowl of the Dipper is the bear itself. And
the three stars of the handle are the hunters
who are chasing it. And the chase has a purpose.
It does. The myth says the hunt happens every
year. In the autumn, the hunters finally catch
the bear. Its blood falls to the earth and turns
the leaves red and orange. That's the fall foliage.
The bear then dies and goes into its den, which
is hibernation, and then it is reborn in the
spring. It's the cycle of the seasons, encoded
in a story in the sky. And on the ground, that
reverence was just as real. You had actual bear
cults. The Ainu people of Japan, for instance,
worshipped the bear as a powerful god that walked
among them in the physical world. And in ancient
Greece. The goddess of the hunt, Artemis, was
deeply associated with bears. There was a famous
cult where young Athenian girls had to go through
a ritual called the Arctia. They would dress
as bear's arctoi to mark their transition into
womanhood. So we went from worshipping them as
star gods and powerful spirits to the teddy bear.
The ultimate domestication, isn't it? We took
the most powerful and feared predator in our
ancestral environment and we turned it into a
child's toy. The story of the teddy bear is actually
very specific, isn't it? It involves a U .S.
president. Theodore Teddy Roosevelt. The year
was 1902. He was on a bear hunting trip in Mississippi
and he was having no luck. So his guys, trying
to be helpful, went out and cornered an old American
black bear. They beat it, tied it to a willow
tree and then called the president over and said,
here, Mr. President, shoot it. Talk about unsportsmanlike.
That's exactly what Roosevelt said. He was disgusted.
He refused to shoot an injured bound animal.
He called it unsportsmanlike conduct and demanded
they put the poor animal out of its misery. And
the story got out. The story got out. A political
cartoonist drew the seam for the newspapers,
and a toy maker in Brooklyn, a man named Morris
Mictum, saw the cartoon, made a little stuffed
plush bear, and put it in his shop window. He
asked for and received permission from the president
to call it Teddy's Bear. And suddenly, the monster
of the woods is something you tuck your kids
in with at night. It completely softened the
public image of the bear. It went from the brown
one that summons death to Winnie the Pooh and
Yogi Bear. But the reality of our interaction
isn't always plush toys and cartoons. We have
a long, dark history of exploiting these animals.
We do. In Shakespeare's time, bear baiting was
a huge public spectacle. You'd go to the theater
to see Hamlet, or you could go next door to the
bear garden to watch a bear chained to a post
fighting off a pack of mastiffs for entertainment.
And today, that exploitation has shifted to something
more. Chemical. Bile farming. This is the hard
part of the deep dive. In traditional Chinese
medicine, bear bile has been used for thousands
of years. The active ingredient is a compound
called ursodeoxycholic acid, or UDCA. And what
does it do? It can help dissolve certain kinds
of gallstones and treat some liver diseases.
So it works. Chemically, yes, the compound is
effective. But here's the absolute tragedy of
the situation. We do not need the bear. We make
it in a lab. Easily. We have been able to synthesize
UDCA for decades. It is cheap, it is pure, and
it involves zero animal suffering. But the farms
still exist. They do. In parts of Asia, thousands
of bears, mostly moon bears or Asiatic black
bears, are kept in tiny crush cages their entire
lives, so small they can't even turn around.
And bile is extracted from their gallbladders,
often through a permanent catheter. It is a grueling,
painful existence. Why does it persist if there's
a synthetic version? It persists largely because
of a deep -seated cultural belief that the wild
or natural product is more potent than the synthetic
one. It's the same kind of thinking that drives
rhino poaching. That's heartbreaking. It is.
But awareness is growing. There are amazing rescue
sanctuaries now, and younger generations in those
countries are moving away from these traditional
remedies. But it is a very slow process. It really
highlights the vulnerability of the bear family.
We think of them as these invisible forces of
nature, but they aren't. Not at all. Six out
of the eight living bear species are listed as
vulnerable by the IUCN. The sun bear, the sloth
bear, the spectacled bear. They're all losing
their forests to deforestation and facing pressure
from poaching. But there is one major success
story we have to mention. The panda. The panda
is the poster child. Literally, it's the logo
of the World Wildlife Fund for a reason. In the
1980s, the panda was doomed. There were only
a few hundred left in the wild. But the Chinese
government launched a massive concerted conservation
effort. What did they do? They created the Sichuan
giant panda sanctuaries. They connected fragmented
bamboo forests with corridors so populations
could mix. They cracked down hard on poaching.
And they invested heavily in captive breeding
programs. And it worked. It worked. The wild
population has rebounded significantly, so much
so that a few years ago they were officially
downgraded from endangered to vulnerable. It
proves that if we actually care, if we put the
resources and the political will behind it, we
can save these species. We can find a way to
coexist with the brown one. So we've covered
the linguistic taboo, the surprising seal cousins,
the nitrogen recycling sleep, and this long,
complicated history with humans. It's a lot to
process. It is. The bear is an animal that demands
our respect, not just for its physical power,
but for its incredible biological sophistication.
As we wrap up this deep dive, is there one final
thought you want to leave our listeners with?
Something for them to chew on. I think so. We
talk a lot about hibernation. I want you to go
back to that nitrogen recycling trick for a minute.
Okay. The muscle preservation. Right now, humanity
is looking seriously at Mars. We want to be an
interplanetary species. But one of the biggest
hurdles for long -duration space travel isn't
the rocket. It's the fragility of the human body.
Muscle atrophy in zero -g. Exactly. If you put
an astronaut in zero gravity for the six to nine
months it takes to get to Mars, their muscles
waste away, their bones weaken. They might arrive
at Mars too weak to even put on their spacesuit
and walk around. Right. We just aren't built
for stasis. But bears are. Bears have cracked
the code. They have figured out how to stay almost
completely immobile for months on end and keep
their muscle mass, their bone density, and their
organ function perfectly intact. They hold the
biological blueprint for a safe form of suspended
animation. So you're saying? I'm saying that
if medical science can fully unlock the bear's
secret, if we can figure out how to trigger that
super relaxed myosin state and that nitrogen
recycling loop in humans, it changes everything.
Not just for space travel. Not just for space.
Think about coma patients not wasting away in
a hospital bed. Think about the elderly maintaining
their strength while they're bedridden after
a fall. The potential applications for human
health are staggering. The key to our future
in the stars might be sleeping in a cave right
now. We just have to be smart enough to learn
from them rather than just fearing them or turning
them into toys. That is a fascinating place to
end. From the brown one to the astronaut's guide
to the galaxy. Thank you for listening to this
deep dive. We'll catch you on the next one. Keep
exploring. Welcome to the debate. Today, we're
looking at a creature that seems to hold this
very specific, almost primal place in the human
imagination. The bear. When you picture a grizzly
standing on its hind legs, I mean, eight feet
of muscle, claws the length of your fingers,
a head the size of a boulder, you are looking
at what appears to be the ultimate expression
of biological power. To me, the family Ursidae
is... It's the tank of the animal kingdom. It
is the apex pinnacle of the order carnivora.
But is that actually true? Or is the bear, as
we're going to discuss, essentially a biological
misunderstanding? Misunderstanding is a very
polite way to put it. I look at that same grizzly
and I don't see a tank at all. I see a creature
that is frankly barely holding itself together.
It's an animal that's trying to be three different
things at once and while failing at most of them.
To me, the bear isn't a masterpiece of evolution.
It's a hack. It's an evolutionary improvisation
that somehow manages to survive despite breaking
every single rule in the book. That is a staggering
claim for an animal that has conquered, I mean,
pretty much the entire northern hemisphere. Is
it, though? Think about how we even talk about
them. The word bear itself is a clue. It comes
from the Old English bara. which, you know, likely
just means the brown one. It's a euphemism. The
proto -dramatic tribes were apparently so terrified
of this animal that they believed if you spoke
its true name, Arcto, it would actually summon
the beast out of the woods. So even our language
is based on this deep -seated fear and avoidance.
We treat it like a monster because we're scared
of it. But when you strip away the fear and you
look at the actual physiology, the quote -unquote
monster is, well... See, I think that fear proves
my point entirely. We don't create linguistic
taboos around weak animals, we create them around
forces of nature, and that is what a bear is.
It is the most massive extant terrestrial member
of the carnivora. That isn't an accident. Evolution
favored mass and power because it works. And
when you look at the skeletal morphology, you
aren't seeing a hack. You are seeing a machine
built for absolute leverage. massive skulls,
thick, dense limb bones, just designed to support
immense bulk. This is a creature built to dominate
its environment through sheer brute force. Brute
force is a great strategy if you're a rock falling
down a hill. But for a complex mammal, it's just
inefficient. And you call them the pinnacle of
carnivora, but that label is incredibly misleading
for how these animals actually live. I mean,
if the bear is the perfect predator, Explain
the giant panda to me. Here you have an animal
with the digestive system of a wolf, a single
stomach, short intestines, genes specifically
coded for meat digestion, and yet it sits there
eating 99 % bamboo. That is not a tank. That
is a physiological paradox. It's a carnivore
trying its best to be a cow. Okay, but the panda
is the extreme outlier. You can't judge the whole
family by its weirdest cousin. But the inefficiency
is there across the entire family. It's not just
the panda. Look at the sloth bear. It lost its
two front upper teeth just so it can act like
a vacuum cleaner for termites. And look at how
they move. This, for me, is the smoking gun.
Cats and dogs are digitigrade. They run on their
toes. That's what gives a sprinter that explosive
speed, right? It lengthens the leg lever. Bears,
they are plantigrade. They walk flat -footed,
on their heels, just like a human wearing snowshoes.
It makes them lumbering. It makes them energy
inefficient. My whole argument is that bears
are successful not because they are perfect predators,
but because they are generalist survivors. They're
running herbivore software on carnivore hardware.
I think you're confusing specialization with
failure. But let's actually open up the hood,
because I want to challenge you on this carnivore
hardware point. You think their digestion is
a mistake. I think it's a very calculated trade
-off. It's hard to see the calculation when you
look at the gut. I mean, let's get technical
for a second. A true herbivore, like a cow or
a deer, has a massive fermentation vat, a rumen,
or a huge cecum, where bacteria spend days breaking
down tough plant cellulose into usable energy.
Bears don't have that. They have a sleek, simple
carnivore gut. No cecum, short intestines, food
goes in, and it shoots out in just a few hours.
Evolutionarily speaking, a bear eating grass
is like trying to fuel a Ferrari with lawn clippings.
The engine just isn't built for the fuel. That's
one way to view it. But here's the other perspective.
Because they lack that fermentation vat, they
aren't weighed down by it. A cow has to sit there
and chew cud for hours on end. A bear is mobile.
And because its gut is simple, it can process
vast volumes of food very, very rapidly. It's
a volume strategy. They are what we call low
-protein macronutrient omnivores. They don't
just graze mindlessly. They target high -value
resources. They high -grade their food. But they
have to high -grade because their system is so
bad at extracting nutrients. The panda has to
eat for 12 to 15 hours a day just to not starve
to death. It relies on its gut microbiome to
do work that its own body physically cannot do.
And yet, look at the brown bear. It dominates
the salmon runs. When a bear is eating salmon,
it's not eating the whole fish. It's eating the
skin, the brain, the eggs, the highest fat content,
and just discarding the rest. That is intelligence.
They use their massive size, that tank frame
you talked about, to monopolize the best food
sources so they don't need a complex gut. They
substitute efficiency with dominance. When you
see Asiatic blackbeers in Taiwan switching between
acorns and hunting ungulates, they aren't confused.
They are maximizing their caloric intake based
on what's available. Maximizing implies they
have a choice. I would argue they're in a constant
state of nutritional panic. If the acorn crop
fails, that bear is in big trouble because it
can't simply switch to grazing on grass like
a deer can, and it's not efficient enough to
hunt mice like a fox. It's stuck in the middle.
The only reason the system works at all is because
they just throw massive amounts of food into
the hopper. But let's go back to the movement.
You mentioned the tank frame. Right, the dense
bones, the power. But at what cost? You have
this heavy, flat -footed animal. We establish
they are plantigrade, walking on their heels.
That provides stability, sure, but it sacrifices
speed and endurance. A wolf can trot for miles
without tiring. A bear has to expend significantly
more energy just to move its own mass from point
A to point B. They tire very quickly. And this
forces them into a hunting style that relies
on ambush or brute force because they physically
cannot sustain a chase. They are chemically incapable
of being a pursuit predator. I disagree that
it's a disadvantage. The plantigrade foot allows
for something a wolf can never do. Bipedalism.
A bear can stand up, it can fight on two legs,
it can reach fruit high in trees, and it frees
up the front paws for manipulation. A wolf interacts
with the world with its mouth. A bear interacts
with its hands. You mentioned the panda earlier.
It developed a pseudo -thumb, a bony extension
of the wrist, just to strip bamboo. That is evolutionary
brilliance. It's tool use without the tool. It's
a wrist bone acting like a thumb because they
don't have a real one. That's exactly what I
mean by a hack. But look at the history here.
The ancestors of bears, like Urcevas. were these
small raccoon -sized things. As the lineage evolved,
they just got bigger and heavier, but they kept
the same basic body plan. The extinct short -faced
bear, Arctodus, was a giant, but even it had
to specialize to survive. And the cave bear,
Ursus spileus? It evolved these massive teeth
for grinding plants, got huge, and then went
extinct the moment the climate shifted because
it had painted itself into a corner. The tank
strategy is risky. If you are big and slow, you
need a lot of food. And if the food moves or
disappears, you die. And yet the family Ursidae
is still here. The cave bear is gone, yes, but
the brown bear remains? The polar bear remains.
And speaking of the polar bear, Ursus maritimus,
this really is the checkmate to your bad design
argument. Here is an animal that took that generalist
frame and moved into the harshest environment
on Earth. It returned to pure carnivory. It hunts
seals on sea ice. It proves that the underlying
machinery is predatory. When the environment
demanded it, the bear didn't become a better
herbivore. It became the ultimate carnivore.
Or as it suggests, that the polar bear is the
only one actually using the machinery for what
it was designed for, while the rest of the family
is just, you know, pretending to be vegetarian.
But even the polar bear is struggling now that
the ice is melting. It's hyper -specialized.
But I want to talk about how they survive the
times when there is no food, because this is
usually the part where people say, but hibernation
is a superpower. Because it is a superpower.
You cannot just dismiss hibernation. It is a
metabolic masterpiece. We're talking about an
animal the size of a grand piano that can shut
down its body for five to seven months. This
isn't just a nap. It is a physiological state
that frankly defies medical understanding. It's
a desperate cope for caloric inefficiency. Hold
on. Let me explain the mechanics before you dismiss
it. Their heart rate drops from 55 beats per
minute to as low as 9. But the real magic is
the chemistry. They don't urinate or defecate
for months. If a human did that, we would die
of uremic poisoning in a week. The bear takes
that toxic urea, breaks it down, and recycles
the nitrogen back into protein to maintain its
muscle mass. It is a closed -loop biological
recycling plant. They use a super relaxed state
of the protein myosin in their muscles so they
don't atrophy. They wake up in spring almost
as strong as when they went to sleep. No other
large mammal can do this. I'll grant you, the
chemistry is impressive. But you have to ask
yourself why they have to do it. They have to
do it because they are too big and too inefficient
to survive the winter any other way. A wolf doesn't
hibernate. A moose doesn't hibernate. They have
strategies to find food in the snow. The bear's
strategy is basically, I give up, I'm going to
sleep until the salad bar opens again. And interestingly,
that tank size you love so much is actually a
problem here. Research shows that smaller bears
can hibernate more efficiently than the massive
ones. A grizzly has so much thermal inertia,
it holds heat so well, that it actually struggles
to lower its body temperature enough to get the
full metabolic savings. It's like trying to cool
down a nuclear reactor just to save fuel. It's
hard work. But it works. They survive the season
of death. And when they wake up, they navigate
the world with a sensory apparatus that is just
unparalleled. The bear's sense of smell is superior
to that of a bloodhound. They can detect a carcass
from kilometers away. Polar bears use scent tracks
on the ice to find each other in a white void.
You call them a hack, but they are operating
with a guidance system that is military grade.
They are operating with one good sensor. They
are essentially a giant nose on four legs. Have
you noticed they don't have whiskers? They are
unique among carnivores in that regard. Their
sight is poor. Their hearing is average. They
sort of stumble through the world led by olfactory
cues because their other senses just aren't sharp
enough to hunt like a cat. A cougar uses sight
and hearing to pinpoint prey. A bear sniffs around
until it bumps into something edible. It's a
brute force application of sensory input. A nose
that can find a seal under a meter of hard -packed
snow is not brute force. That is precision. But
I want to pivot to their mind, their behavior.
Because this is where the apex title is truly
earned. They are solitary, powerful individualists.
Asocial is the word I would probably use. Intelligent
carnivores like wolves need a pack. They need
a support system. A bear is a single unit of
dominance. It doesn't need help. When two bears
meet, they assert dominance through what's called
frontal orientation, showing the canines, stretching
the neck. It's honest signaling. They don't rely
on the complexity of a hierarchy. They rely on
the reality of their own strength. That solitary
nature is a weakness, though. It limits what
it can do. A pack of wolves can take down a bison.
A single bear has to be much, much more careful.
And it makes them fragile. If a wolf breaks a
leg, the pack might feed it. If a bear breaks
a leg, it dies. That solitude dictates a life
of extreme caution. Most bear interactions are
just avoidance. They spend their entire lives
trying not to fight because a fight is just too
expensive. And we should probably talk about
the dark side of that individualism. Infanticide.
It's a brutal topic, but it's biologically significant.
Male brown and polar bears will kill cubs to
bring the female back into estrus. It's horrific
efficiency. It is evolutionary strategy. It shows
a drive for genetic dominance that overrides
any sort of social niceties. The male is ensuring
his genes propagate. It's not nice, but nature
isn't nice. It's effective. It's primitive. Social
carnivores have moved past that. They raise young
communally. But I will concede that bears aren't
purely robotic monsters. We see spectacled bears
in South America communicating with facial markings.
We see aggregations at salmon runs where they
tolerate each other. And obviously the mother
-cub bond is fierce. But it's fleeting. Once
those cubs are gone, they are back to being lonely
wanderers. They are wanderers because they require
vast territories to fuel that massive engine.
Which brings us right back to the central question.
You see collection of parts that don't quite
fit. A carnivore gut. A herbivore diet. Flat
feet. A solitary life. I see a synthesis. I see
an animal that took a different path. It diverged
from the dog -like ancestors 20 million years
ago and just decided to maximize size and durability
over speed. And I still maintain they are evolutionary
tinkerers. They are the jack of all trades, master
of none. They can climb, but not like a monkey.
They can swim, but not like a seal. They can
hunt, but not like a wolf. And they can eat grass,
but not like a cow. They are successful because
they are stubborn, not because they are perfected.
Well, maybe stubbornness is just another word
for resilience. Whether it is the polar bear
on the ice or the sloth bear sucking up termites,
the family Ursidae finds a way to impose its
bulk on the world. They are the heavyweights.
They are the great bears. They are certainly
unique. I mean, there is nothing else quite like
them on Earth. And that uniqueness, I think,
we have to note, is fragile. We should say that
despite being these tanks, six of the eight bear
species are listed as vulnerable. Even the brown
bear faces extinction in parts of its range.
It is a sobering reality. The great bear, Ursa
Major, has been in our mists for 13 ,000 years.
The cosmic hunt mists appear on both sides of
the Bering land bridge. We have looked up at
the stars and seen a bear for as long as we have
been human. That myth might outlast the animal
if we aren't careful. Habitat loss, the trade
in bear bile, climate change, these are threats
that brute force cannot solve. The tank armor
doesn't stop a bullet or a shrinking ice cap.
A tragedy we must work to prevent. I hope this
debate has shifted your perspective, even slightly,
on what is happening inside that massive frame.
It has. And for those listeners who want to see
what a perfect predator bear might have looked
like, one that actually followed the rules, I
really encourage you to look up the extinct Hemisoninae,
the running bears. These were bears that stayed
on their toes. They chased prey like wolves.
It's a fascinating glimpse of the road not taken.
The bear that could have been. Thank you for
listening. Welcome to the debate.