Scramble Squares - Bears

There are eight species of bears alive in the world today: the American black bear, Asiatic black bear, brown bear, giant panda, polar bear, sloth bear, spectacled bear, and sun bear. The koala is not a bear at all, but a marsupial, as is the type of panda which is not the giant panda. The grizzly bear is another name for the brown bear, originally describing its grizzled coloration, resulting from its fur being lighter in color at its ends. The oldest bear species is the giant panda, evolving from the same ancestor as the raccoon 18 to 22 million years ago. The spectacled bear is the second oldest species, also evolving 10 to 15 million years ago from the same family as the giant panda. The other six types of bears are closely related to each other. The youngest type of bear is the polar bear, which is believed by scientists to have evolved from the brown bear in the last 3 million years.

Bears have an amazing sense of smell, much more sensitive than a wolf’s sniffing ability. The long snout of a bear contains scent sensing mucous membranes which are one hundred times larger than the human nose. The male brown bear roams throughout an area of from 100 to 400 square miles, following very faint scents.

Although bear cubs stay with their mothers for up to two and a half years and with each other for one to three years more, bears lead basically a solitary existence. It is rare for two male bears to be in the same vicinity. They communicate their presence to other bears by leaving their own scent on trees against which they rub their backs (bears do not do this rubbing merely to scratch an itch). Pandas do handstands against the trunks of trees and rub their backs upside down!

Bears living in temperate climates have dormant periods during the winter months, when they burrow into dens and live off of the fat stored in their bodies during their five to eight months of feeding on vegetation, fruits, insects, small mammals and fish. Their pulse rates drop to 8 to10 beats per minute during this dormant period, but they are not in a true hibernation state, since they can be easily awakened. Awakening bears during their dormant period is a very bad idea. That is when they are the crankiest!