Who Asked: Celebrity Guest-Stumper, Erin Hunter
Website: www.warriorcats.com
Novel: Seekers, the upcoming series about bears which launches in April, 2008.
About the Novel: In Seekers Book Two, our four central characters—Kallik the polar bear, Lusa the black bear, and Toklo and Ujurak who are grizzliesare united for the first time as they begin their long journey in search of destiny, hope, and what it truly means to be a bear in the wild. A gathering of bears beside a remote lake seems like the ideal place to learn from their elders, but not all the bears have their best interests at heart, and soon one of the four is in very grave danger.
Answer: I did not find any documented cases of bears of different species attacking each other.
One reason for this is that the habitats of the eight species of bears do not overlap by much. The Map of Bear Species on Wikipedia displays this graphically. The only bears that are likely to run into each other are brown bears and black bears in some parts of Alaska.
Bears of the same species often attack each other, especially as their habitat shrinks. They’re usually fighting over things like food or mating rights. And nobody had better get between a mother bear and her cubs! Bears says, “Spectacular fights occur between big male brown bears when they are courting, and when they gather at rivers to fish for migrating salmon. If the challenged bear does not turn his head and back up, the two go at each other with vicious lunges, slapping and biting until one bear gives up.”
People are still learning about the social order of bears. For instance, Bears says, “Grizzlies are not as solitary as was once thought. Female grizzlies will adopt motherless cubs and may even develop friendships.”
Which means that, if you want three kinds of bears at your gathering, go for it! I look forward to reading Seekers.
Thank you for playing Stump the Librarian!
Amber
Web Resources
Print Resources
- Bears by Donald Olson
