To celebrate the International day for biodivesity, a picture of the Marsican brown bear. It’s a subspecies of the Eurasian brown bear living exclusively in central Italy, of which less than 100 remain in the wild.
To celebrate the International day for biodivesity, a picture of the Marsican brown bear. It’s a subspecies of the Eurasian brown bear living exclusively in central Italy, of which less than 100 remain in the wild.
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Although smaller than Alps and Balkans brown bears, marsican brown bears males can weigh between 130-200 kg with an upright height of 180-190 cm, while females are smaller and seldom weigh over 120 kg. Generally the male/female ratio in this species is 1:1. The bear may live up to 40 years and it is the largest Italian carnivore, even though its diet is about 80% based on vegetables. Bears mainly feed on beech cupules, acorns, rhamnus berries, berries, roots, soft fruit, insects, honey and obviously meat, including carcasses that they usually find at the end of the winter, under the melting snow. That’s the time when they come out of their dens after hibernation.
The bear habitat is very heterogeneous according to the season, ranging from mountainous forests to high ground grasslands, where they move in hot summer months to look for a cool place or feed on Rhamnus berries that ripen at the end of summer. The noise that bears make is called growling.
Mating occurs in spring throughout early summer and after the earliest stages of development, the fertilized ovum stops in a stage of quiescence or embryonic diapause. In autumn, all the bears needs to feed a lot (hyperphagia) to store up fat for the winter hibernation period and the females even more in order to have sufficient resources to complete pregnancy successfully. The bears need to store up fat before falling in a state of a partial hibernation from which they might awake from time to time and search for food in occasionally warm days. For its winter sleep the bear sets its den in extremely inaccessible and quiet places, often caves in the rock wherein the animal collects grass and tree branches to make up its bedding.
In the lair, between December and January, the female gives birth to 1-3 cubs which weigh 200-500 grams soon after birth. The high nutritional value of the breast milk makes them grow up very quickly in the first few months of life
Since females stay with their cubs approximately for 2 years, spending with them at least the next winter-spring time, they may give birth every 3-4 years only and they’re not fertile before the age of 4. All these factors coupled with an high mortality rate among cubs in their first year of life, make the number of fertile females in a small population a key element for the survival of a viable bear population.
Was it checking when the bakery was going to close, to [break into it](https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/in-italy-a-bear-breaks-into-a-bakery-to-eat-biscuits.html)?