| By: Aaron Wirsing After more than a decade of research, with field work lasting from 2012-2022 (with a pause in 2020 because of the pandemic), the Aleknagik Bear Project has officially wrapped! The project began as an effort to enumerate the brown bears visiting a collection of six creeks (Happy, Hansen, Eagle, Bear, Yako, Whitefish) draining into Lake Aleknagik (of Bristol Bay, Alaska) during the summer sockeye salmon spawning season. To estimate numbers of bears on each stream during each summer (mid-July through late August), we relied on a non-invasive approach: stringing barbed wires across each stream at a couple of locations to snag hair from passing bears for later genetic analysis, which furnishes individual IDs (genotypes). The wires were a huge success: all told, we collected nearly 2,500 hair samples that, following collaborative analysis with Jen Adams and Lisette Waits of the Laboratory for Ecological, Evolutionary and Conservation Genetics at the University of Idaho, yielded 845 detections of 229 bears (118 females, 105 males, and 6 bears of unknown sex). As mentioned earlier in this blog, we used these detections to estimate that, during a given summer, each of these small streams could be visited by as many as 40 different bears, all seeking to nourish themselves on salmon that are key to a successful hibernation. Over the years, the project has expanded in exciting ways, yielding 11 papers thus far (including 2 with UW undergraduates as lead authors) and spawning a number of investigations that are still underway. On such project, a first-of-its-kind led by former SEFS undergraduate Natalee Bozzi, used video recordings of bears detected near our barbed wires to document and explore the drivers of 8 different foraging tactics that these bruins use to exploit salmon. The video to the right depicts a sow and her cubs engaged in one such tactic: passive foraging, where the bears park themselves in a stream and wait for the fish to come to them. Natalee's paper is currently under review by the Journal of Mammalogy. As we work up the data from this longitudinal study, we also want to look back and those who made it possible, first and foremost PEL collaborator and SAFS emeritus professor Tom Quinn, who was gracious enough to invite me to join the Alaska Salmon Program and work on bears with him, as well as Chris Boatright and Jackie Carter, for coordinating everything at the Aleknagik field camp, and our many (and awesome) field research technicians. Please stay tuned for more updates on this project! |  Aaron Wirsing and Tom Quinn on the Alaskan tundra near Hansen Creek. Sockeye salmon team at the mouth of Hansen Creek. Ultimately, they will make their way into the stream to spawn, or be eaten by bears first! Note how shallow the water is - this a perilous journey, bears or no bears. For Tom Q, I'll mention that some of these fish even fall prey to gulls (which he adores) while making their way upstream. Bears (here a sow and her cubs) passively (sit and wait) foraging for salmon on the aptly named Bear Creek (near wire set #2). |
View from the mouth of Whitefish Creek. A great example of what we deem "everyday Alaska".
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