Black bears in Yosemite National Park and elsewhere are notorious for seeking out human food, even breaking into cars and cabins for it. A new study reveals just how much human food has contributed to the diets of Yosemite bears over the past century. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, were able to estimate the proportion of human-derived food in bears' diets by analyzing¹ chemical isotopes³ in hair and bone samples. The results, published in the March issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, show how bears' diets have changed over the years as the National Park Service took different approaches to managing bears and people in Yosemite.

 

"Yosemite has a rich history of bear management practices as a result of shifting goals over the years," said Jack⁴ Hopkins, lead author of the paper and a research fellow at UC Santa Cruz. "What we found was that the diets of bears changed dramatically after 1999, when the park got funding to implement⁵ a proactive（有前瞻性的） management strategy to keep human food off the landscape."

 

That funding has been used primarily to buy bear-resistant food-storage containers and increase enforcement of their use, hire more staff to manage problem bears, and establish a "bear team" to increase visitor compliance⁶ with rules for storing food in areas such as campgrounds and hotels. The study, which focused on bears that had learned to eat human food or food waste, found that the proportion of human foods in their diets decreased by about 63 percent after the new strategies were implemented⁷. Unfortunately, according to Hopkins, once a bear gets used to eating human food it will continue looking for it, and even when visitor compliance is high, there will always be a few people who make the mistake of leaving their food where bears can get it.

 

Hopkins, who worked as a biologist in Yosemite National Park for several years, conducted the study as a graduate student at Montana State University. He teamed up with coauthor Paul Koch, a professor of Earth sciences and dean of physical and biological sciences at UC Santa Cruz, to do the isotope² analysis of hair and bone samples. Contemporary hair samples were collected during bear management actions and from barbed-wire hair snares⁸（陷阱，圈套） deployed⁹ throughout Yosemite. Historical samples were obtained from museum collections.

 

"This study shows the power of using museum specimens¹⁰ and archived historical material to reconstruct the ecology of a species and to answer pressing management questions," Koch said. "The remarkable¹¹ thing is that the bears that eat human food are now back to the same level of dumpster diving as in 1915, despite the fact that there are now millions of visitors in Yosemite every year and presumably a lot more garbage."

 

Yosemite National Park was established in 1890, and Hopkins obtained samples from bears killed between 1915 and 1919 to represent the earliest time period. In those early years, bears were attracted to garbage dumps in the park and were often killed when they became a nuisance（损害，麻烦事）. Visitors liked to see bears, however, and in 1923 the park began intentionally¹² feeding bears where visitors could watch them. The last artificial feeding area closed in 1971. There was also a fish hatchery in Yosemite Valley, from 1927 to 1956, where bears once helped themselves to fresh trout¹³ from the holding tanks. But closing the hatchery and the feeding areas didn't stop bears from eating human food.

 

"The bears just went back to the campgrounds and hotels and continued to find human food," Hopkins said.

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