Status
Habitat
Range
Group
An animal that moves an entire ocean's nutrients into a forest.
Bears carrying salmon inland and abandoning half-eaten carcasses deposit marine nitrogen into riverside forest soil. Isotope studies find ocean-derived nitrogen in trees hundreds of metres from the water. The bear is a nutrient pump.
Hibernation is not simple sleep. Heart rate falls to as low as eight beats per minute, the animal does not urinate or defecate for months, and it emerges having lost fat but remarkably little muscle — a physiology that medical researchers study with envy.
Frames in the archive
Full gallery
Salmon Nitrogen
Katmai — the falls, the queue, the routine.
Where we photograph it
The open shelf
More frames of the grizzly bear
Streamed live from the Commons Quality Images archive, fifteen at a time. For viewing here — each frame remains its photographer’s.
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