Spectacled bear
The spectacled bear, known to scientists as Tremarctos ornatus, is the only bear native to South America. Millions of children know a fictional member of the species. Paddington Bear, the character from Peru, is a spectacled bear. The real animal is stranger than the cartoon. It lives in the Andes Mountains and climbs trees to avoid people. It eats mostly plants, yet it can act as a hunter. Its kind once belonged to a family of short-faced bears, and it is the last one left. The IUCN now classifies it as vulnerable because its habitat keeps shrinking. How did this bear get its odd name, where did it come from, and how does it live in cloud forests and high grasslands? And can it survive the people who now share its mountains?
In Quechua and Aymara, the bear is called jukumari, and in Quechua also ukumari or ukuku. These names translate as hole bear. The tan facial markings usually appear everywhere except around the eyes, so the eyes look like holes in a pale mask. Science took up the same idea. The Greek root trem means hole, and arctos means bear. The scientific name points to an unusual hole in the bear's upper arm bone, the humerus. The word ornatus is Latin for decorated. English speakers chose the name spectacled bear for light colouring on the face, neck and chest that can resemble eyeglasses. They also call it the Andean bear for the mountains it inhabits.
The fur itself is blackish, though individuals range from jet black to dark brown and even a reddish hue. The markings are beige or ginger across the face and upper chest. Not every bear has the spectacle pattern. The pale pattern differs slightly on each animal, so individual bears can be told apart by it.
The spectacled bear is a mid-sized species, and the gap between the sexes is large. Males are about a third larger than females in dimensions and sometimes twice their weight. Males weigh from 100 to 200 kg, with an average near 115 kg. Females range from 35 to 82 kg and average about 65 kg. Only the polar bear rivals this difference among modern bears. A captive male judged obese reached 222.5 kg. Shoulder height runs from 70 to 90 cm, and the tail is only about 10 cm long. Head-and-body length can span 1.2 to 2 m. Mature males measure at least 150 cm.
Fossils of a North American bear called Plionarctos, from the late Miocene, mark the start of the short-faced bear family. Mitochondrial DNA suggests this family split from the main bear subfamily about 5.7 million years ago. Three genera descended from Plionarctos. They were Arctodus, Arctotherium and Tremarctos. Genetic dates put Arctodus at between 5.5 million and 4.8 million years ago, and the split between Arctotherium and Tremarctos at 4.1 million years ago. The first fossils of all three appear in North America around 2.6 million years ago. That timing coincides with the start of the Quaternary Glaciation and the formation of the Panama Land Bridge. A specimen from Taunton, Washington, about 2.9 million years old, looks like a link between Plionarctos and Tremarctos.
The name short-faced is misleading. The skulls are shorter and taller, with deep snouts and short nasal bones, but the face is not actually shorter than in most living bears. Ursine bears carry 74 chromosomes, while Tremarctos has 52. Even so, a spectacled bear has crossed with an Asian black bear in captivity.
The closest relative was Tremarctos floridanus of North America. It was around twice the size of the spectacled bear, comparable to a larger American black bear. It lived from 2.7 million years ago until at least 23,000 years ago. The paleontologist Kurtén compared the pair to brown bears and Eurasian cave bears. Arctodus and Arctotherium vanished at the end of the Pleistocene, around 12,000 years ago.
The spectacled bear itself is a latecomer to South America. Its fossils do not appear there until the Holocene. One explanation is that the giant lowland bear Arctotherium wingei, which disappeared around 12,800 years ago, had kept Tremarctos out. The spectacled bear prefers highland forests between 1800 and 3100 meters. The fossils of A. wingei were found no higher than 1860 meters at Tarija, so the two bears could have overlapped very little.
Genetic history shows a long decline. Effective population peaked about 450,000 years ago. By the Holocene it had fallen to about 2,000 breeding individuals, tied to climate swings and the Late Pleistocene extinctions. The earliest known remains are from a male in Chaquil Cave in north central Peru, dated to 6,790 years ago. Its badly worn teeth suggest it ate mostly meat.
Picture a strip of land more than 4600 km long and only 200 to 650 km wide. That is the range of the spectacled bear. It runs along the Andes through western Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. It continues into western Bolivia and northwestern Argentina, with some rare spillover into eastern Panama.
For most of its history the species had a reputation for adaptability. It has been found in cloud forests, high-altitude grasslands called páramo, dry forests and scrub deserts. One population on the Peru-Ecuador border used as many habitat types as brown bears now occupy worldwide. That changed during the last 500 years, when populations became fragmented.
The best habitats are humid to very humid montane forests. These cloud forests usually form a band 500 to 1000 m thick, somewhere between 1000 and 2700 m above sea level. The wetter the forest, the more food species it holds for bears. Bears are not usually found below 1900 m in the foothills, but occasionally they reach as low as 250 m. They can also go up to the snow line, above 5000 m.
Bears clearly move among these zones. Researchers still do not know the seasonal pattern of those journeys.
Four bear species habitually climb trees. They are the American black bear, the Asian black bear, the sun bear and the spectacled bear. For the Andean species, climbing is a survival skill. It lets the bear live alongside humans by retreating up even the tallest trees. Once up there, a bear may build a platform for concealment, rest and food storage.
In Andean cloud forests these bears may be active by day and by night. Bears in the Peruvian desert reportedly bed down under plant cover during daytime. They are solitary and avoid each other to limit competition, yet they are not territorial. At abundant food sources they have been recorded feeding in small groups. Males average a home range of 23 km2 in the wet season and 27 km2 in the dry season. Females average 10 km2 in the wet season and 7 km2 in the dry season.
Encounters are usually calm. A bear that meets people or other bears acts docile but cautious, unless it sees a threat or its cubs are in danger. Mothers have attacked poachers. Only one human death has been reported, and the bear in that case had already been shot while being hunted. Cougars prey on cubs, and possibly male spectacled bears do too. Jaguars appear to be avoided, and they live at different altitudes. The two animals overlap by about 900 m only if the whole Cordillera Oriental is counted, according to unpublished data.
The longest-lived captive bear, at the Salisbury Zoological Park in Maryland, reached 37 years and 11 months. Wild lifespans have not been studied, but 20 years or more is thought common unless humans interfere.
Most of what is known about reproduction comes from captive animals. In captivity, mating clusters between February and September, depending on latitude. In the wild it can occur almost any month, with peaks in April and June. That is the start of the wet season, when fruit ripens. A pair stays together for one to two weeks and mates repeatedly, each time for 12 to 45 minutes. Courtship involves games and non-aggressive fights, and both animals can be loud.
Wild births usually come in the dry season, between December and February. Gestation lasts 5.5 to 8.5 months. A litter holds one to three cubs, with two as the average and four rare. Newborns have closed eyes and weigh roughly 300 to 330 g. This species does not give birth during a hibernation cycle. The mother raises the cubs in a small den and waits until they can see and walk, three to four months after birth.
Cubs often stay with the mother for a year before striking out alone. She nurses for a year and keeps caring for them for another. Litter size rises with the mother's weight and with how predictable the fruiting is. Females first give birth around age 5, and breeding maturity in captivity falls between four and seven years. Males stay fertile nearly all their lives. Since a mother can raise at least two cubs to adulthood, the population has a chance to replace itself.
A spectacled bear can detect a tree heavy with ripe fruit from the ground, because its sense of smell is extremely sensitive. Its hearing is only moderate, and its vision is short. Smell guides a diet that is mostly plants. Meat makes up only about 5 to 7 percent, and sometimes as little as 5 percent.
The menu includes cactus, bamboo hearts, palm nuts, orchid bulbs, moss and fallen fruit. It also includes bromeliads such as Puya, Tillandsia and Guzmania, along with frailejon and unopened palm leaves. A bear will peel back tree bark to reach the nutritious second layer. Much of this vegetation is too tough for most animals, and the bear is one of few species in its range to exploit it.
The body is built for the job. Compared with an American black bear, the spectacled bear has a larger zygomaticomandibularis muscle relative to its total jaw muscle mass. Its fourth premolar has blunt lophs rather than a flesh-shearing blade. It has three pulp cavities instead of two, and can have three roots instead of two. These features suit grinding and crushing. Apart from the giant panda, it is perhaps the most herbivorous living bear.
Still, it is South America's largest land predator. Only the Baird's tapir, South American tapir and mountain tapir are heavier among native land animals. One hunting method is to surprise or overpower prey, climb on its back and pin it with weight, paws and claws. Another is to chase prey onto rough hillsides or precipices until it falls. The kill is dragged to a safe spot, often a tree nest or forest, and eaten down to skeletal remains.
Most prey is small. It includes rabbits, mice, other rodents, arthropods, carrion and birds at the nest, such as tinamous and lapwings. Bears can also take adult deer, llama, cattle and horses. A remote video-monitor once recorded a spectacled bear attacking an adult mountain tapir perhaps nearly twice its own mass.
The bears also visit farms for sugarcane, honey and maize. In large cornfields, up to nine have fed close together.
Jorge Isaacs, the Colombian writer, painted a picture of bear hunting in his novel María. In the book, trophy hunting of Andean bears was a pastime of privileged young men. The real practice seems to have been popular in some rural areas of Latin America during the 19th century. Documents from the Ecuadorian aristocracy of that era also mention pet bears. These pressures may have eased, but isolated reports persist. Confiscated captive bears often cannot readjust to the wild and must stay in zoological facilities.
Today poaching and habitat loss are the main threats. Agricultural expansion and illegal mining drive the habitat loss. Hunters have several motives, including the pet trade, natural products and religious or magical beliefs. In places the bear is tied to myths of disappearing women or children, or its parts are used in traditional medicine. The gall bladders appear to be valued in traditional Chinese medicine and can fetch a high price internationally. Even so, conflict with people seems the most common cause of poaching across much of the range.
Fragmentation is worst in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina. Small, isolated populations can fail even without hunting. Cleared land also offers less of the habitat the bears need and makes them easier to reach. Extensive logging and farming may be the most pressing problem, since the bears depend on trees. When natural food runs short, bears turn to crops and livestock, and conflict follows. Effects of climate change are not fully understood.
People far from the Andes tend to see a charismatic, mostly vegetarian symbol of wilderness. People who live among the bears often see a cattle predator to be killed pre-emptively. Any lost animal gets blamed on the bear. Some cattle attacks are probably due to other predators. Farmers may also assume a bear killed an animal it only scavenged.
In 1998 researchers measured how much bear range sat inside protected areas. They found only 18.5 percent of it in 58 protected areas, and many of those were small. In the northern Andes the problem was sharpest. The largest park covered 2050 km2. The median size of 43 parks in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador was 1250 km2, perhaps too small for a sustainable bear population. The researchers argued for habitat blocks outside protected areas.
Ecuador shows the pattern. Its spectacled bears live in roughly 50000 km2 of páramo and cloud forest. About a third of that is in the National System of Protected Areas. The other 67 percent is unprotected and undeveloped. Land there has already shrunk by roughly 40 percent from the original distribution. Conversion to farmland has fragmented territory into many patches, and many are small. Local extinctions may follow over the long term.
Conservation work in Venezuela dates to the early 1990s. It relied mostly on environmental education and protected areas, and it made the bear an emblem of national conservation along with a 10-year action plan. Evidence that such programs reduce poaching or extinction risk is debated. Laws against bear hunting exist but are rarely enforced, so poaching continues even inside protected areas. In 2006 the Spectacled Bear Conservation Society was founded in Peru to study and protect the species.
The IUCN recommends more conservation land, better research and monitoring, stronger management of existing areas, and stewardship programs involving local residents. Researchers add several ideas. They propose protecting high-quality habitat while keeping connections between elevational zones, and managing human-bear conflict. They also suggest rethinking roads, which act as barriers to movement. They link bear habitat to water management, since protecting watersheds benefits bears and people alike. Where many people already live and new reserves are unlikely, natural corridors linking cloud forest and páramo may be the best tool.
The actor and writer Stephen Fry followed a rescue of two spectacled bears in Peru for two BBC programmes. He wrote a book about it, titled Rescuing the Spectacled Bear: A Peruvian Diary.
Updated
Common questions
Why is it called the spectacled bear?
The name refers to light colouring on the face, neck and chest that can resemble eyeglasses on some individuals. Not every bear has the markings, and the pattern differs on each animal.
Is the spectacled bear a meat eater?
It is mostly herbivorous. Meat makes up only about 5 to 7 percent of its diet, though it can hunt prey as large as deer, cattle or horses.
Where does the spectacled bear live?
It lives mostly in the Andes Mountains of northern and western South America. Its range runs through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, western Bolivia and northwestern Argentina.
Is the spectacled bear endangered?
The IUCN classifies it as vulnerable. The main threats are habitat loss from farming, logging and illegal mining, along with poaching and conflict with people.
Is it dangerous to people?
It usually reacts in a docile but cautious way and often retreats up a tree. Only one human death has been reported, and the bear had already been shot while being hunted.
All sources
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