Bottle-fed grizzlies make nice for science

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

PULLMAN, Wash. - On the leading edge of grizzly bear research, sometimes it all comes down to baby bottles, pacifiers and kiddie pools.

Those are among the most important tools being used by scientists here at Washington State University’s one-of-a-kind Bear Research Center as they breed and hand-rear grizzly cubs in a bid to create safer subjects for wide-ranging research on Ursus arctos horribilis.

When he founded the center two decades ago, zoology professor Dr. Charles Robbins was happy to have a captive audience of “problem” adult grizzlies who had been given the boot from national parks like Yellowstone and Glacier. “The whole facility was set up in 1986 because there’s only so much you can do with wild bears,” he points out.

With its half-dozen pens and 2.2-acre exercise yard, the bear center, cobbled together from an old primate research facility, allowed Robbins and colleagues to make big strides in their studies of what bears eat, how they forage and other topics.

But the wild bruins, pulled from their native homes because of garbage-eating and picnic-stealing habits that brought them too close to humans, were on one side of the heavy steel fences and the humans were on the other side. So when Dr. Lynne Nelson, a heart specialist in WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine, wanted to conduct studies on hibernation, one of the great mysteries in all the animal kingdom, the bears needed to be drugged to allow researchers to draw their blood and capture ultrasound images of their hearts.

Is it hibernation or is it drugs?
Not such a good scenario. “Since hibernation can look a lot like anesthesia, it was very hard to delineate the effects of the drugs from the effects of the physical state,” Nelson explains. In fact, says Robbins, “It became pretty clear that 70 percent of the results were due to the anesthesia.”

“That’s when we frankly decided that if we were ever going to learn anything true about hibernation, we’d have to bottle-feed them,” he says. “At that point we decided, ‘Let’s raise some bears.’”

Two of the center’s adult females were allowed to breed in 2002 and gave birth in 2003 to Mica and Luna. The baby girls, about the size of big baked potatoes when born, were taken away from their moms after four weeks. Robbins and Nelson stepped in as surrogate parents to nurture, bottle-feed and gently but firmly train the bears not to bite or jump on their human handlers.

Will work for treats
That training has paid off as the furry research subjects approach three years in age and tip the scales at 250 pounds each. In exchange for treats like apples, honey water and Starbucks pastries, Mica and Luna are eager to help their human handlers probe the secrets of hibernation by holding out their paws for blood tests, and standing for fairly long periods in one place to accommodate ultrasound readings.

The knowledge gained from the WSU-led studies and others in which the bears, currently a total of 10, are employed has a direct payoff for the species itself, which is on the federal government’s list of threatened animals — outside of Alaska. By learning more about how bears feed and interact with humans and other species, the researchers can advise wildlife managers as they try to maintain viable populations of the threatened giants.

Helped partly by Robbins’ work, Yellowstone’s bear recovery program is successful enough by some measures that the government is thinking about removing Endangered Species Act protections from grizzlies in that vicinity, an idea denounced by many conservationists.

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