Months without eating, drinking or a toilet
When a BLACK BEAR or BROWN BEAR settles into its DEN for winter, it can go for months without eating, drinking, or going to the toilet. Its heart slows to a handful of beats a minute and its body temperature drops a little. Remarkably, it recycles its own waste: substances that would normally leave the body in urine are turned back into protein, and the bear loses very little muscle or bone despite lying still for so long.
Scientists argue over whether this counts as true hibernation, because bears can wake and move about far more easily than animals like dormice. Either way, it is how a bear survives winters with no food. Mothers give birth in the den, and each newborn CUB is tiny — often a few hundred grams, the size of a squirrel — and blind, feeding on rich milk until spring.
A meat-eater living on bamboo
The giant PANDA belongs to an order of meat-eating mammals and has a gut built for meat, yet it eats almost nothing but bamboo. Because bamboo gives so little energy, a panda spends around twelve to fourteen hours a day eating. It grips the stems with a false thumb, an enlarged wrist bone that works like an extra finger.
Conservation has made a difference: in 2016 the giant panda was moved from endangered to vulnerable on the international list of threatened species, after decades of protecting and replanting its mountain bamboo forests in China.
Paddington was a spectacled bear
The SPECTACLED bear, named for the pale rings around its eyes, is the only bear native to South America, living in the Andes. Paddington Bear, who came from darkest Peru, belongs to this species. The SUN BEAR of Southeast Asia is the smallest bear and has an extremely long tongue for licking HONEY and insects out of trees.
The SLOTH BEAR of India feeds largely on termites. It can close its nostrils, has a gap where two front teeth would be, and uses its lips like a vacuum cleaner to suck insects out of their nests — noisily enough to be heard some distance away.
Bears that feed a forest
When SALMON swim up rivers to breed, a GRIZZLY or KODIAK bear — both kinds of brown bear — catches them and often carries them into the FOREST to eat. The leftovers rot into the soil, and scientists have traced nitrogen from the ocean in the salmon into the needles of trees growing near the rivers. The bears are, in effect, moving fertiliser from the sea to the land.
Bears also eat plenty of plants, including BERRIES, nuts and roots. Heavy as they are, a brown bear can run at around fifty kilometres an hour in a short burst, far faster than any person. The rest of the grid holds the POLAR BEAR, a thick coat of FUR, a strong PAW with long CLAWS, a low GROWL, a sheltering CAVE and anything FURRY. Our polar animals page covers the biggest bear of all, and our Winnie the Pooh page the real bear the famous one was named after.