POPULATION ECOLOGY Brown bear body mass and growth in northern and southern Europe

• Main Author: Sigbjørn Stokke
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Body size influences most behavioral; anatomical; physical; physiological; and life-history traits of an organism; Norway; Ursus arctos
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.486.2443; http://www.bearproject.info/pdf/apub/A 73.pdf

Abstract We tested six hypotheses to explain expected geographical differences in body masses of 1,771 brown bears (Ursus arctos) from northern and southern Europe (Sweden and Norway compared with Slovenia and Croatia): Bergmann’s rule, the fasting endurance hypothesis, and the dietary meat hypothesis, which predicted larger bears in the north; and hypotheses stressing the role of high primary productivity, high population density, low seasonality, and length of the growing season, which predicted larger bears in the south. Although brown bear populations in North America vary greatly in body mass, we found no significant difference in body mass between the two European popu-lations using a new analytical approach incorporating modeled age-standardized body masses in linear models, when correcting for sex and season. The greater variation in