Deep in the forests of south-central Sweden, brown bears (Ursus arctos) emerge from hibernation ravenous. Mama bears and their cubs will consume massive amounts of berries, bees, voles, and maybe other meat to plump up before heading into hibernation again in the fall. This has been the bears’ annual routine for millennia.
But a group of researchers in Scandinavia that has been tracking brown bears there for three decades has started to notice something just a bit different in female bears’ behavior in recent years. “More and more females are keeping their cubs longer,” says Joanie Van de Walle, a graduate student at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada, who is studying the ecology of Scandinavian brown bears. While for the most part, mother bears in the region have tended to care for cubs for only about a year and a half, many of the bears in Sweden are ...
