Status
Least Concern
Habitat
Montane forest, tundra, river valley
Range
North America
Group
Bears
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.
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Salmon Nitrogen
Katmai — the falls, the queue, the routine.
