Friday, August 22, 2008

Bears: Handle With Care Like physicians, wildlife biologists first want to cause no harm to the animals they study. But an analysis of the long-term effects of capturing and handling two species of bears--grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis) and American black (Ursus americanus)--indicates that the animals suffer more than previously thought. "We're throwing up a red flag," says Roger Powell, an evolutionary ecologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and one of the study's authors. Powell suspects that the results apply to any species that is handled. "It's time to step back and reevaluate our methods." Powell's colleague, Marc Cattet, a wildlife biologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, began suspecting problems in the wildlife he was capturing about 5 years ago, particularly among grizzly bears in the Canadian Rocky Mountains....

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