THE presence of noisy ecotourists may unexpectedly benefit brown bears in the wild. Though the tourists scare big male bears away from prime feeding zones, hungry mothers and cubs are not deterred and seize the opportunity to eat free from the threat of infanticide, helping to boost the population.
Despite good intentions, ecotourists often do more harm than good. People, boats and cars can disturb the feeding, mating and parental behaviour of animals, sometimes with lethal consequences (New 杏吧原创, 6 March, p 6).
But Owen Nevin at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK and Barrie Gilbert at Utah State University in Logan studied brown bears, including grizzlies, at a remote salmon spawning ground on the coast of British Columbia and found that while adult males avoided the tourists, feeding only in the early morning before the tourists arrived at 7 am, the presence of people didn鈥檛 bother mothers and cubs, who seemed to use the noise of buses as a cue that dangerous males had left the stream. Even when males had left the area altogether, females didn鈥檛 appear until the tourists did (Biological Conservation, DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2004.06.011).
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Dominant males may be less tolerant of people because of bad experiences in the hunting season. But their absence allows mothers and cubs to eat more salmon, improving litter sizes and cub survival, which in turn should increase the population, Nevin says.
鈥淐arefully managed ecotourism could be the keystone for bear conservation,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hese sites could almost become bear factories.鈥�